Weekend Roundup

Having a lot of trouble focusing these days. Partly the number of
things broken and need of (often expensive, sometimes just time consuming)
repairs has been mind-boggling. And with the blog on the blink, I've fallen
into a two-day week rut, compiling "Music Week" on Mondays then trying to
catch up with the world on "Weekend Roundup" on Sundays. Several of the
bits below could have been broken out into separate posts -- indeed, I
wonder if they shouldn't all be.

I'm thinking especially of the Michelle
Goldberg "Two-State" comment as something I could have written much more
on. I don't know if I made the point clearly enough below, so let me try
to sum it up once more: there are several distinct but tightly interlocked
problems with Two-State: (1) the natural constituency for Two-State (at
least among pro-Israelis) is the "liberal Zionists" -- an ideology based
on an unsustainable contradiction, and therefore a diminishing force --
and without supporters Two-State is doomed to languish; (2) when liberals
break from Zionism (which is inevitable if they have both principles and
perception) they must do so by committing to universal rights, which means
they must at least accept One-State as a desirable solution (Goldberg, by
the way, fails this test); (3) as long as [illiberal] Zionists refuse to
implement Two-State (and they have a lot of practice at staving it off),
liberals (anyone with a desire for peace and justice) should regroup and
insist on universal rights (e.g., One-State); (4) under pressure, I think
that Zionists will wind up accepting some version of Two-State rather than
risking the ethnic dilution of One-State. People like Goldberg would be
better off getting ahead of this curve rather than trying to nitpick it.
Someone like Netanyahu has thousands of excuses for postponing agreement
on a viable Two-State solution. On the other hand, he has no legitimate
defense against charges that Israel is treading on the basic human rights
of millions of Palestinians under occupation. That's where you want to
focus the political debate. And that shouldn't be hard given Israel's
recent demonstration of its abuse of power.

The march to war against ISIS is another subject worthy of its own
post. There are many examples, but the one I was most struck by this
week was a
letter to the Wichita Eagle, which reads:

The threat of ISIS appears similar to the threat of the Nazis before
World War II. The Europeans ignored Adolf Hitler's rising power because
they were tired of war.

As ISIS spreads through the Middle East at will, our nation's leaders
are assessing how to counter this threat. ISIS is well-equipped, having
seized abandoned equipment the United States gave the Iraqi army, and it
is growing in strength, numbers and brutality.

What is the U.S. to do? That decision is in the hands of our nation's
leaders. However, with the future leader of ISIS having said in 2009 to
U.S. soldiers who had held him prisoner, "I'll see you in New York,"
trying to avoid conflict because we're tired of war should not be the
determining factor.

Much of Europe succumbed to Hitler because Europeans were "tired of
war."

Similar? Germany had the second largest economy in the world in the
1930s, one that was reinvigorated by massive state spending on munitions
at a time when the rest of the world was languishing in depression. Even
so, Hitler's appetite far exceeded his grasp. Germany was able to score
some quick "blitzkrieg" victories over France, Norway, and Poland, and
occupy those countries through fronts offered by local fascists -- the
Vichy government in France, Quisling in Norway, etc. But even given how
large and strong Germany was, it was unable to sustain an assault on the
British Isles, and its invasion of Russia stalled well short of the Urals.
And, of course, provoking the US into entering the war hastened Germany's
loss, but that loss was very likely anyway. It turns out that the world
is not such an easy place to conquer, and authoritarian regimes breed
resistance everywhere they tread.

In contrast, ISIS is a very limited backwater rebellion. Its extremist
Sunni salafism limits it to about one-quarter of Iraq and maybe one-half
of Syria, and it was only able to flourish in those areas because they
have been severely war-torn for many years. They lack any sort of advanced
manufacturing base. Their land is mostly desert, so very marginal for
agriculture. Their "war machine" is built on confiscated weapons caches,
which will quickly wear out or be exhausted. They do have some oil, but
lack refineries and chemical plants. Moreover, their identity is so narrow
they will be unable to extend their rule beyond war-torn Sunni regions,
where they're often viewed as more benign (or at leas less malign) than
the Assad and Maliki regimes.

So it's hard to imagine any scenario where ISIS might expand beyond its
current remote base: comparing it to Germany under Hitler is laughable.
The one thing they do have in common is an enthusiasm for war, developed
out of a desire to avenge past wars. You might say that that the West
after WWI was "tired of war" but that seems more like a sober assessment
of how much was lost and how little gained even in winning that war --
after Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans are similarly dismayed at how
much they've lost and how little they've gained after more than a decade
of war. Many Germans, on the other hand, were willing to entertain the
delusion that they only lost due to treachery, and that a rematch would
solve all their problems. It's easy in retrospect to see this asymmetry
in war lust as a "cause" of the war, but jumping from that insight to a
conclusion that the West could have prevented WWII by standing up to
Hitler sooner is pure fantasy. To prevent WWII you'd have to go back to
Versailles and settle the first phase of what Arno Mayer later dubbed
"the thirty-years war of the 20th century" on more equitable terms --
as effectively (albeit not all that consciously) happened after WWII.

As with post-WWI Germans, ISIS' enthusiasm for war is rooted in many
years of scars -- scrapes with the French and British colonialists, with
Israel, with brutal Baathist dictators, with the US invasion of Iraq and
American support for Kurdish and Shiite militias. Most ISIS soldiers grew
up with war and know little else -- in this the people they most closely
resemble are not the Nazis but the Taliban, a group which resisted long
Russian and American occupations, separated by a bloody civil war and a
short-lived, brutal but ineffective period in power. On the other hand
the idea that the US should shrug off their "war weariness" and plunge
into another decade-plus struggle with another Taliban knock-off isn't
very inspiring. Isn't repeating the same steps hoping for different
results the very definition of insanity?

Still, the war drums keep beating. The Wichita Eagle has had three
such op-eds in the last week on ISIS: from Charles Krauthammer, Cal
Thomas, and Trudy Rubin -- each with the sort of screeching hysteria
and ignorance of ecology I associate with finding roaches under the
bathroom lavoratory. Clearly, what gets their goat more than anything
is the very idea of an Islamic State: it looms for these people as
some sort of existential threat that must be exterminated at any cost --
a reaction that is itself every bit as arbitrary, absolutist, and
vicious as what they think they oppose. But in fact it's merely the
logical response to the past wars that this same trio have urged us
into. It's worth recalling that there was a day when small minds like
these were equally convinced that the Germans and Japanese were all
but genetically disposed to hatred and war. (Robert Morgenthau, for
instance, wanted to spoil German farms with salt so they wouldn't
be able to feed enough people to field an army -- that was 1945?)
Europe broke a cycle of war that had lasted for centuries, not by
learning to be more vigilant at crushing little Hitlers but by
joining together to build a prosperous and equitable economy. The
Middle East -- long ravaged by colonialism, corruption, and war --
hasn't been so lucky, but if it is to turn around it will be more
due to "war weariness" than to advances in drone technology. The
first step forward will be for the war merchants to back away --
or get thrown out, for those who insist on learning their lessons
the hard way.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt published an essay in the magazine Commentary --
at the time still a liberal magazine -- titled "To Save the Jewish Homeland."
She lamented the increasingly militaristic, chauvinistic direction of Zionism,
the virtual unanimity among Jews in both the United States and Palestine that
"Arab and Jewish claims are irreconcilable and only a military decision can
settle the issue; the Arabs, all Arabs, are our enemies and we accept this
fact; only outmoded liberals believe in compromises, only philistines believe
in justice, and only shlemiels prefer truth and negotiation to propaganda and
machine guns . . . and we will consider anybody who stands in
our way a traitor and anything done to hinder us a stab in the back."

This nationalist strain of Zionism, she predicted, might succeed in
establishing a state, but it would be a modern-day Sparta, "absorbed with
physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests
and activities." It would negate the very humanistic Jewish values that
originally fed the Zionist dream. "Palestine Jewry would eventually separate
itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into
an entirely new people," she writes. "Thus it becomes plain that at this
moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected
at the price of the Jewish homeland."

It's difficult to avoid the conclusion, sixty-six years later, that she
was right.

The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals -- and I was one,
once -- subscribed for so many decades, has been tarnished by the reality
of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights
organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing
strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and
a powerful, intolerant religious right -- this mixture has pushed liberal
Zionism to the brink. [ . . . ]

The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary,
a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying
out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved
through colonization and purification of the tribe.

"Liberal Zionist" is a contradiction that cannot survive. Indeed,
in Israel it is all but dead. The key tenet of liberalism is belief
in equal rights for all. In Israel it is virtually impossible to find
any political party -- even "far left" Meretz -- willing to advance
equal rights for the "Palestinian citizens of Israel" much less for
those Palestinians under occupation. On the other hand, the debate
as to whether Zionism is inherently racist has been proven not just
in theory but empirically. As Max Blumenthal shows in Goliath: Life
and Loathing in Greater Israel, everywhere you look in Israel you
see growing evidence of racism.

In America, it's long been possible for many people (not just Jews)
to combine domestic liberalism with an unthinking, uncritical allegiance
to Israel. Of course it's getting harder to sustain the ignorance that
allows one to think of Israel as a just nation. (The so-called Christian
Zionists -- or as Chris Hedges puts it, "American fascists" -- require
fewer illusions, since they are likely to be racist and militarist at
home as well as abroad.) It sounds like Goldberg -- an early J-Street
supporter -- has started to make the break, but she's still not willing
to go full-liberal and endorse full and equal rights for all Israelis
and Palestinians -- the so-called One-State Solution. She wants to
salvage the so-called Two-State Solution, with Israel returning (for
the most part) to its 1967 borders and an independent Palestinian state
in Gaza and the West Bank (with or without Jerusalem as its capitol).

The Two-State Solution was originally proposed by the UN in 1947, but
the Zionist leadership weren't satisfied with the proposed borders, and
the Palestinian leadership objected to the whole thing, preferring a
unified democracy (with a 2-to-1 Arab majority) where nobody would have
to move. After the 1949-50 armistice lines were drawn, Israel greatly
expanded its borders and had expelled over 700,000 Arabs from its
territory, ensuring Jewish demographic dominance. Those borders, which
held until 1967, have long been accepted as permanent by most Palestinian
groups and by all neighboring Arab countries: a deal that could have been
made by Israel any time since the mid-1990s, but which wasn't, because
no ruling party in Israel would accept such a deal, nor would the US or
the so-called Quartet (which had endorsed the deal) apply significant
pressure on Israel to settle. There are lots of reasons why Israel has
taken such an intransigent stand. One is that the demise of liberalism
leaves Israel with no effective "peace block" -- the price of occupation
has become so low, and the political liabilities of peace so high, that
Israel currently has no desire to change the status quo.

This is, of course, a huge problem for anyone who believes in equal
rights and/or who puts a positive value on peace in the Middle East.
Such people -- by which I mean pretty much all of us (except for a few
warmongers and apocalypse-hungry Christians) -- can only make progress
toward a settlement by putting pressure on Israel, which is to say by
increasing the costs to Israel of its present occupation policies. One
way is to counter Israeli propaganda, to expose the facts of occupation
and to delegitimize Israel's position. Another step is BDS, with the
prospect of growing ever more extensive and restrictive. Another is to
adjust the list of acceptable outcomes: that may mean giving precedence
to the inclusive, equal rights One-State Solution over the unsuccessful
Two-State scheme.

The fact is that Two-State was a bad idea in 1947 and remains a bad
idea today: it is only slightly less bad now because the "ethnic cleansing"
that could have been avoided in 1947 is ancient history now; it is also
slightly worse because it leaves us with a lot of refugees who will still
be unable to return to Israel, and who still have to be compensated and
patriated elsewhere. The dirty secret of the Two-State Solution is that
it leaves Israel unaltered (except for the relatively trivial loss of some
settlements) -- free to remain the racist, militarist Sparta it has become
ever since 1948. That's why Israel will choose Two-State over One-State:
Two-State guarantees that their Jewish state will remain demographically
supreme, whereas One-State risks dilution of their ethnic solidarity. But
even if the West's game plan is Two-State all along, you're not going to
get there without playing the One-State card. If a US administration
finally decides we need to settle this conflict, it won't start (as Obama
did) by demanding a settlement freeze; it will start by demanding equal
rights for all within whatever jurisdictions exist, and complete freedom
from Israel for any jurisdictions that do not offer full and equal Israeli
citizenship. Only then will progress be made. The problem with Goldberg's
plea is that she's still willing to sacrifice her principles for Israel's
identity.

Ezra Klein: The DNC'a braidead attack on Rand Paul: Paul's been
reading Hillary Clinton's neocon ravings, and responded: "We are lucky
Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way and the Obama administration did not
bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS."
The DNC's response: "It's disappointing that Rand Paul, as a Senator
and a potential presidential candidate, blames America for all the
problems in the world, while offering reckless ideas that would only
alienate us from the global community. [ . . ]
That type of 'blame America' rhetoric may win Paul accolades at a
conference of isolationists but it does nothing to improve our standing
in the world. In fact, Paul's proposals would make America less safe
and less secure." Klein adds:

This is the brain-dead patriotism-baiting that Democrats used to loathe.
Now they're turning it on Paul.

There are a few things worth noting here. The first is the ferocity
with which the DNC responded to an attack that was, in truth, aimed more
at Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. The second is the degree to which
a Rand Paul-Hillary Clinton race would scramble the politics of national
security, with Democrats running against Paul in much the way Bush ran
against Kerry. And the third is that it's still the case in foreign
policy, the real divide isn't left vs. right, but interventionists vs.
non-interventionists.

Actually, the "real" political divide is between status quo cons like
Obama and Clinton on the "left" side and various flavors of crackpots
(including Rand) on the "right." But in foreign policy, the latter have
come to include a growing number of non-interventionists, not so much
because they believe in peace and justice as because they've come to
realize that imperial wars bind us closer to the dark-skinned aliens
we claim to be helping, and because some of them begin to grasp that
the security apparatus of the state they so loathe (mostly because it's
democratic, or pretends to be) could just as easily turn on them.
Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton have managed to hire virtually every
known "liberal interventionist" as part of their efforts to toady up
to the military-security complex, even though virtually none of their
real-world supporters buy into that crap. Someone smarter than Rand Paul
could turn this into a wedge issue, but he'll tie it to something stupid
like preventing the Fed from counteracting recessions.

Here's the dirtiest of dirty little secrets -- and it's not really a secret,
it's just something no one ever talks about: The entire jihadi mess we're
facing now all descends from the brilliant idea of "giving the Soviets their
own Vietnam" in Afghanistan. How's that for learning a lesson from Vietnam?
Well, that's the lesson that Jimmy Carter's crew learned -- and Ronald Reagan's
gang was only too happy to double down on.

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States
and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, "It's
very good." Then he edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it
will generate immediate sympathy." He predicted that the attack would
"strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced
terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a
massive hemorrhaging of terror."

I remember watching him on TV at the time, as well as a similarly gloating
Shimon Peres, and a slightly more somber John Major offering to share with
the US Britain's vast experience in cultivating terrorists. You couldn't
ask for better examples of how to react badly and make a problem worse.
Silverstein then quotes from Hillary Clinton's
Atlantic interview ("They are driven to expand. Their raison d'etre is
to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank --
and we are all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain
that? I'm thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat."):

Here you have a perfect example of the sickness I outlined above. In the
1950s communism was the bugaboo. Today, it's jihadism. Clinton's conception
of the latter uses almost exactly the same terms as those of the Red Scare:
words like expansionist, angry, violent, intolerant, brutal, anti-democratic.
There's even a touch of Reaganism in Clinton's portrayal of the fall of
communism. There's the notion that through all of our machinations against
the Soviet Union -- the assassinations, the coups, the propping up of
dictators -- all of it helped in some unspecified way to topple Communism.
She further bizarrely characterizes our anti-Communist strategy as an
"overarching framework," when it was little more than knee-jerk
oppositionalism to the Red Menace.

What is most pathetic about this political stance is that it offers no
sense of our own identity, of what we stand for. Instead, it offers a
vague, incohate enemy against whom we can unite. We are nothing without
such enemies.

Next up is David Brooks, if you care. Richard Ben Cramer, in How
Israel Lost: The Four Questions (by the way, probably the best single
book about Israel in the last twenty years) hypothesizes that the reason
Israel is so determined not to negotiate an end to the conflict is that
its leaders fear losing the shared identity of having a common enemy in
the Palestinians. Take the conflict away and the various Jewish subgroups --
the Ashkenazi, Sephardim, Mizrachi, Russians, Americans -- will splinter
and turn on each other, fighting over diminishing spoils in a suddenly
ordinary state.

Dean Baker: Subverting the Inversions: More Thoughts on Ending the Corporate
Income Tax: Baker is arguing that the inefficiencies caused by the
Corporate Tax Avoidance Industry are so great that we might be better off
eliminating the tax altogether: if there were no tax, there'd be no need
for corporations to pay lobbyists and accountants to hide their income,
and we'd also eliminate scourges like private equity companies. First
obvious problem here is that leaves a $350 billion revenue shortfall,
which Baker proposes recovering with higher dividend and capital gains
tax rates. (Of course, we should do that anyway.) One long-term problem
is that federal taxes have radically shifted from being collected from
businesses to individuals, which makes the tax burden more acutely felt
by the public. A VAT would help shift this back, but so would anything
that tightened up loopholes and reduced corporate tax evasion. Another
advantage of having a corporate income tax is that it could be made
progressive, which would take an extra bite out of especially large
and/or profitable companies -- the former mostly benefitting from
weak antitrust enforcement, the latter from monopoly rents -- which
would both raise more revenue and take it from companies that are
relatively safe from competition. I'm not strictly opposed to what
Baker is proposing, but I'd like to see it worked out in a broader
context that includes many other tax reforms that tackle inequality,
lack of competition, globalization, and patents more systematically.
I suspect Baker would prefer this too.

Medium's CSS is actually pretty f***ing good. [Warning: very nerdy.]
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. The visual design properties of web
pages can generally be controlled by attaching CSS code to the "generic
markup code" in a web page (something called HTML). Having worked with
pre-Web GMLs (Generic Markup Languages, especially the standardized one,
SGML), I've always been very "old school" about coding web pages, which
means I've never embraced CSS as a programming paradigm. So my reaction
here was first one of shock that so much work went into this. (Looks like
four programmers for a couple years, although it's unlikely that they only
wrote CSS.) I was also at a loss for much of the terminology (LESS? SASS?
mixin?), not that I can't guess what "z-index" implies. It's not that I
haven't learned anything in the 15 years since I started building web
sites, and it's certainly not necessarily the case that what's changed
has changed for the better, but if I'm going to get over the hump of
embracing this change I need good examples of making it worthwhile. And
this, I suspect, is one.

Rebecca Solnit: Men Explain Things to Me: Reprints the title essay,
or at least an early draft of it, to Solnit's new book. Of course, I've
had clueless men explain things to me, too. (A few clueless women as
well, but singling out men is within reasonable statistical norms.) And
in groups I have a relatively sensitive CSMA/CD switch, so I'm easily
interrupted and loathe to reclaim the floor, so the larger the group
the more likely I am to be regaled with unrefuted (not irrefutable)
nonsense. Much of my consciousness of such dynamics comes from reading
early feminist texts long ago, revelatory even in cases where women are
reacting not so much to gender as to implicit power relationships --
something gender was (and not uncommonly still is) inextricably bound
up in, but something that didn't end with gender. So Solnit's stories
speak to me, even when the precise terminology is slightly off. [One
of my favorite tech acronyms, CSMA/CD stands for "carrier sense multiple
access with collision detection" -- an algorithm for efficiently deciding
when a computer can send data over a common bus network. The same would
work for deciding who speaks when in an open room, but actual results
are often distorted by volume and ego.]

One more little thing. I put aside the August 19, 2014 issue of the
Wichita Eagle because I was struck by the following small items on page
3A:

Man sentenced to more than 7 years in prison . . . Scott Reinke,
43, was given 86 months in prison for a series of crimes including burglary,
theft, possession of stolen property, making false information and fleeing
or attempting to elude law enforcement. . . . In tacking on the additional
time last Friday, [Judge Warren] Wilhelm noted Reineke had a criminal
history of more than 50 felony convictions.

Kechi man gets nearly 10 years for child porn . . . Jaime Menchaca,
34, of Kechi pleaded guilty to one count of distributing child pornography
and was sentenced to 110 months in prison. . . . In his plea, Menchaca
admitted that on Sept. 13 he sent an e-mail containing child pornography
to a Missouri man.

There's also another piece on page 5A:

Sex offender pleads guilty to child porn . . . Dewey had a 1999
conviction in Pueblo, Colorado, for attempted sexual assault of a child.
He admitted in court Monday that he was found last September with images
and videos of child pornography that he obtained via the Internet.

Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a 20-year prison
term when Dewey is sentenced on Nov. 4.

This struck me as an example of something profoundly skewed in our
criminal justice system. I won't argue that child pornography is a
victimless crime (although what constitutes pornography can be very
subjective), but possession of a single image strikes me as a much
more marginal offense than repeated instances of property theft. (I
don't think I even noticed the last case until I went back to look
for the first two; it's harder to judge.) Glad the burglar/thief is
going to jail, but wonder if it wouldn't make more sense for the
child porn defendant to spend some time with a shrink, and maybe pay
a nominal fine.

Also on the front page of the Eagle is an article called "Kan. GOP
lawmakers vow to look out for oil interests": Senator Roberts, Reps.
Huelskamp, Pompeo, and Jenkins prostate themselves at a Kansas
Independent Oil & Gas Association confab. They all agreed they
wanted lower taxes and less regulation. Nobody said much about the
recent tenfold increase in earthquakes.

Daily Log

Went to a movie yesterday, so I thought I should catch up, without
going to the trouble of posting anything. (Notation appears to have gone
out of date. This is everything I can recall from 2014.)

Movie: Cavalry:
A-

Movie: A Most Wanted Man:
B

Movie: Belle:
A-

Movie: The Lego Movie:
B-

Movie: The Grand Budapest Hotel:
B+

That's all I'm seeing for the whole year. I've certainly never seen so
few films eight months into the year any time since I've been with Laura.
We must have seen some late 2013 releases early in the year. Several films
in the theatre now I'm interested in: Boyhood; The Hundred-Foot
Journey; Magic in the Moonlight; Sin City: A Dame to Kill
For. Wouldn't mind seeing Dawn of the Planet of the Apes or
Lucy either.

Music Week

Was surprised to see rated count over 40, then looked closer and the
subtraction result turned out to be an impossible 143. Looks like I slipped
a digit two weeks ago. That was about when I had an editing accident and
lost several hundred grades, sending me into a panic trying to figure out
how to fix the breach. This seems to be the summer of things breaking --
I still figure that's better than the summers of mysterious lung diseases
a few years back. Thinking about it, the 43 count means I've been listening
to more Rhapsody, which I'll explain by last week's oversized
Streamnotes plus the
fact that my
pending queue is nearly dry
(18 new 2014 records, or 10 not counting this week's unpacking).
I can remember days when I had more than 100 unrated in the queue.
I still have some items from previous years I haven't gotten to
(although only 1 of those was from 2013, a piece of vinyl I should
look for), so we're talking real low priority stuff. No wonder my
eye is wandering.

This year I decided not to do my
all-consuming metacritic file
(link is to 2013), but needing some kind of aide de memoire I've kept
a running list of albums considered noteworthy and assigned priorities
to them to give me something to work with. Recently, it looked like
this, but since I was weeding out albums
once I had heard them, it was pretty much useless for anyone else. So
it occurred to me that it would be better to keep those records in,
and for that matter to add my grades (where available). The combined
file now looks like
this. I've added some options to
select based on priority levels, so you can get the old format
like this if you have any
reason to do so. There's also an option to get an
even bigger file with all
the "priority 0" records I've noted -- everything mentioned in AMG's
weekly featured releases gets noted in the data file, even if I
consider it to be of no interest whatsoever. Currently the data
file lists 1644 records. Since last year's metacritic files ran to
(7868+1100) records, I haven't been looking very hard. But as my
queue drains I'll work on that some more. (I especially want to
beef up the jazz listings.)

I fell behind on
Twitter, wound up having
to knock out nine tweets to wrap this up. Even so, I skipped a few
of the "old music" albums -- they'll show up next Rhapsody Streamnotes,
although you can check out Michael Tatum for Joy Division, below.
Wrote one tweet for Jeff Palmer -- an organ player in my database
I had no other consciousness of -- but played two albums, both good,
but when you trade in Victor Lewis (a drummer I revere) for Rashied
Ali you get an extra spark.

Speaking of Twitter, I retwitted one from Mike Konczal last night:

Sad that Michael Katz has passed away. A remarkable scholar, very
important to me. Read Tom Sugrue's moving tribute:
[link]

I added my own two cents:

Let me add that Michael Katz's history of the early school reform
movement as class thought control/socialization was a key insight to
me.

Katz wrote a lot of books, but the only ones I read were The Irony
of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century
Massachusetts (1968; reissued 2001), and Class, Bureaucracy, and
Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (1971; expanded
1975). He found that the early proponents of universal education like
Horace Mann -- a name we knew because Wichita named a school for him --
were less concerned with offerng opportunities to Irish immigrants than
with socializing them in proper New England ways, and conversely that
the Irish resisted such efforts to brainwash them. I read these books
when I was a high school dropout with my own intense distrust of an
educational system that seemed geared to turn us into regimented factory
workers (if we survived the army and Vietnam).

Katz later moved on to write about America's welfare system, in books
like In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in
America (1986; expanded 1996), The Undeserving Poor: From the
War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (1990), and Improving Poor
People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as
History (1995), and more recently has published on immigration.
Most recently, he wrote Why Don't American Cities Burn? (2011),
about a murder in Philadelphia and all the attendant baggage of race
and class. I hadn't thought much about Katz until The Undeserving
Poor showed up in one of my recent book trawls. Interesting how
his career developed. For more, see this
In Memoriam by Thomas Sugrue (whose own books include The
Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(2005), Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil
Rights in the North (2008), and Not Even Past: Barack Obama
and the Burden of Race).

One more Twitter note, or at least semi-related. Medium is either
a spinoff or an independent venture funded with Twitter money -- I
don't pretend to understand how it works, but I have heard that they
have some money to hire writers, and have hired Robert Christgau to
write some Expert Witness/Consumer Guide posts. He has an account now
that you can follow. He'll
explain it all in an introductory post on September 2, followed by
the first actual CG reviews on September 5.

Weekend Roundup

The first thing to note here is that the Four Wars of 2014 -- Ukraine,
Syria, Iraq, and Gaza -- are still going strong, and the conflicting
interests super- and not-so-super-powers have in them offer excuses
enough to frustrate any efforts at mediation. There have also been
reports of shelling along the India-Pakistan border in Jammu, and the
US is upset about China challenging a US "reconnaissance plane" near
the Chinese border.

The least-reported of these conflicts is in the Ukraine, where
various "pro-West" or "pro-Europe" forces staged a coup against
Russia-leaning President Viktor Yanukovich in February. As Ukraine
shifted to the West, various revolts broke out in heavily Russian
southwest Ukraine. Crimea declared independence and asked to be
annexed by Russia, which Putin readily agreed to. Other separatist
militias seized power elsewhere in southeastern Ukraine, and the
"pro-West" Kiev government has been trying to suppress the revolt
the old-fashioned way, with bombing and strafing. It's unclear to
what extent Russia has been actively promoting and supporting the
separatists: NATO and Kiev have asserted various instances, and
Putin has steadfastly denied them.

The result so far is that the civil war in
Donbass
(around Dontesk) has resulted in about 4,000 deaths -- I don't
think that includes the Malaysian airliner that was shot down,
surely an accident but part of the war's "collateral damage."
The US has clearly sided with the "pro-Western" government in
Kiev and taken a leading roll in attempting to punish Russia
with sanctions. No one thinks Russia is totally innocent here,
but the US position is the result of a long neocon campaign to
advance NATO to Russia's borders, to corner and cower Russia
to prevent the emergence of any non-US military or economic
power center. And the failure to cover this war is largely due
to blithe assumptions of US benevolence and Russian malevolence
going back to Cold War dogma, as well as an abiding belief that
force is an effective solution to the world's problems.

If the US was not so entangled in its faith in military force,
you would see a concerted effort to mediate the four wars. Rather,
Obama has embraced force as America's fundamental strategy in all
four arenas. (Syria is only slightly murky here: the US dislikes
both sides but can't see any option other than searching for a
third side to arm.) The US is most directly involved in Iraq,
where we've taken a sudden interest in protecting small minorities
like Yazidis and Turkmen who have the most propaganda value. Then
there is Gaza, where the ceasefire has been repeatedly broken by
Israel, still refusing to open Gaza's borders to allow a semblance
of normal everyday life. As I've written before, the "truce" terms
Hamas offered at the beginning of the recent military hostilities
were completely fair and reasonable. Netanyahu's continued rejection
of the terms should make you reconsider just who "the terrorists"
are in this conflict. The Gaza death count has continued to climb
over 2100. Another Israeli civilian was killed in recent days,
bringing the total to 4, in one of the most one-sided massacres
of recent times.

While it is possible that ISIS is indeed a terrorist group one
cannot negotiate with -- at least that's what the hawks want us to
believe -- Hamas has practically been begging for a deal since
they entered Palestinian electoral politics in 2006. Israel has
not only rejected their every overture, Israel repeatedly drags
them back into armed conflict. The US is schizophrenic about this:
on the one hand we spend a lot of money trying to support the "good
Palestinians" over in the West Bank in the vain belief that if we
can improve their economic well-being that will help us move toward
peace. On the other hand, any time Israel decides to trash whatever
good we've done, we applaud and make sure to replenish their arms.
I want to quote a section from Josh Ruebner's Shattered Hopes:
Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace (p. 190):

Promoting "economic growth" for Palestinians living under Israeli
military occupation, while simultaneously flooding Israel with the
weapons and providing it with the diplomatic protection it needs to
entrench this military occupation, is a nonsensical proposition. At
best, these policies reveal that the United States is working at
cross-purposes; at worst, they signal that it is trying to reconcile
Palestinians to their open-air prison existence by making it slightly
more palatable. What USAID fails to understand publicly is that
Israel's military occupation is specifically designed to de-develop
the Palestinian economy, not to encourage Palestinian economic
growth.

Israel's eviscertation of teh Palestinian economy is integrally
woven into the very fabric of its military occupation in innumerable
ways. The hundreds of roadblocks, checkpoints and other barriers to
movement that Israel maintains in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
inhibit the transportation of people and goods, which forces the
ever-increasing localization of the economy. Israel's blockade of the
Gaza Strip has reduced its population to penury and almost total
reliance on international charity for survival. Even before, Israel's
formal imposition of the blockade on Gaza in 2007, Israel's earlier
destruction of the Gaza Strip's only airport and its prevention of the
building of a seaport there had greatly constricted Palestinians in
the Gaza Strip from engaging in international trade. Similarly,
Israel's wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and its control of
the West Bank's border corssings with Jordan, greatly reduce trade
opportunities as well. Finally, Israel's widespread razing of
Palestinian agricultural land and fruit-bearing trees, along with the
expropriation of Palestinian land and water resources for its illegal
settlements, have devastated the Palestinian agricultural sector.

The US at least nominally wants peace in Palestine, just not enough
to stand up to Israel, which at most wants quiet but is willing to
settle for hatred as long as Palestinians remain powerless -- which
is one effect of mired in a hopeless economy. In one telling note,
it's worth noting that the power plant in Gaza that Israel blows up
every few years is insured by the US: Israel breaks it, we pay to
fix it, then we pay Israel to break it again. It's a perfect example
of government waste, but Americans don't seem able to see that, in
large part because we think our interests extend everywhere, we think
we have to choose sides everywhere, and we choose those sides on the
basis of ignorance and identity.

Some scattered links this week:

Ed Kilgore: Jeffords and the GOP's March to the Right: Vermont's
last Republican Senator, James Jeffords, has died. He's best remembered
for switching parties in 2001, denying Cheney's stranglehold on the
Senate. Kilgore drew up a list of "moderate" Republican senators from
1976, just 25 years back, on the even of the Reagan juggernaut, and
found 17 (of 38) qualified (not including the likes of Bob Dole and
Howard Baker Jr.), adding VP Nelson Rockefeller and (more of a stretch)
President Gerald Ford. Since then the Republican Party has been purged
as rigorously as Stalin's CP -- the only division today seems to be
between those who are categorically insane and those who are merely
deranged.

Hillary's done it again. Her pro-war comments in that famous interview
two weeks ago have painted her into a right wing neoconservative corner.
In 2016, a Democratic candidate will again emerge to run to her left
and win the party base, again because of pro-war positioning on the
Middle East that Hillary has undertaken in order to please
neoconservatives.

The last time it was Iraq, this time it was Gaza. Hillary Clinton had
nothing but praise for Netanyahu's actions in Gaza, and echoed him in
saying that Hamas just wanted to pile up dead civilians for the cameras.
She was "hepped up" to take on the jihadists, she said that Obama's
policy of "not doing stupid shit" was not a good policy. She undermined
Obama for talking to Iran and for criticizing Israel over the number of
civilian casualties in Gaza. She laid all the fault for the massacre at
Hamas's door.

And once again, Hillary Clinton will pay for this belligerency; she
won't tenant the White House.

Weiss knows he's "going out on a limb" so he cites some polling that's
worth noting:

Consider: Gallup says that Israel's actions in Gaza were unjustified
in the eyes of the young, people of color, women, and Democrats, and
overwhelmingly in some of those categories 51-25% disapproval among
the young. 47-35 percent among Democrats, 44-33 among women, 49-25
among nonwhites.

The problem, of course, is that while the majority of Democrats
may have broken from AIPAC over Gaza, how many Democrats in Congress
have? Not Elizabeth Warren. Not even Bernie Sanders. Certainly some
hypothetical Democrat could score points against Clinton in primaries
by painting her as a warmonger and pointing out how her obeissance
to AIPAC only serves to prolong conflict in the Middle East, but it's
impossible to identify a real Democrat who could effectively make
those points. (Dennis Kucinich, for instance, tried twice, failed
abysmally, and doesn't even have his House seat to stand on now.
Howard Dean pretty much permanently discredited himself when he
became a lobbyist for the Iranian terrorist group MEK.)

The main thing that bothers me about Clinton isn't policy --
not that there aren't many points to disagree on -- so much as the
stench of dynasty. More and more the Democratic Party resembles
the so-called progressive parties of Pakistan and India, cynically
ruled by corrupt families and cliques that needn't offer their
supporters anything more than a small measure of protection from
the viciousness of their opponents. You'd think that 238 years
after the declaration of democracy in America we would have become
more sophisticated than that -- indeed, we probably were, but have
recently devolved into the present kleptocracy. Obama at least
offered a symbolic break from the Bush-Clinton dynasties, but in
the end that was only symbolic: his administration was rife with
Clinton partisans, and he sealed the party's fate by breaking up
the grassroots organization that had elected two Democratic
Congresses -- foolishly or cynically preferring to "deal" with
lobbyists and Republicans rather than risk democracy within his
own party.

More Israel Links:

Kate: Soldiers fire on Palestinian protesters in Nablus, including 14-year
old boy: compendium of many news reports. One reports a poll where:
"over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a
Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason"; "over 75 percent
of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between
Arabs and Jews"; "sixty percent of participants said they would not allow
an Arab to visit their home"; 40 percent said "Arabs should have their
right to vote for Knesset revoked"; 55 percent said "Arabs and Jews should
be separated at entertainment sites." Hard to see how anyone could look at
these figures and not recognize that Israel has become profoundly racist
and segregationist.

Philip Weiss: 'NYT' op-ed calls on Jews to abandon liberal Zionism and
push for equal rights: In a nutshell, "equal rights" is the common
denominator argument for all occasions, but especially for beleaguered
minorities wherever they may be. It's intuitively right, and it's the one
settlement that can appeal to all sides. It is, therefore, a position
frequently advanced by Diaspora Jews. On the other hand, Israel is an
ethnocracy, a place where one "chosen people" controls the state and
uses it to oppress others -- a distinction that is becoming increasingly
impossible to ignore. Cites the piece,
Antony Lerman: The End of Liberal Zionism, which says: "I still
understand its dream of Israel as a moral and just cause, but I judged
it anachronistic. The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic
and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious
messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national
self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification
of the tribe."

Also, a few links for further study:

Patrick Cockburn: How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate: Excerpt from
Cockburn's forthcoming [January 6?] book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS
and the New Sunni Uprising. There is a shortage of reliable info
about ISIS, as well as a lot of propaganda. (The most laughable was
Trudy Rubin claiming to know "The Truth About ISIS.") Not sure this
helps a lot either, although the key point that the jihadists derive
from the US disruption of Iraq is well taken. More detailed and less
inflamatory is
The leader of ISIS is 'a classic maneuver warrior', although the
tactical comparisons to Genghis Khan strike me as bullshit.

Thomas Frank: "Wanted Coltrane, Got Kenny G": Interview with Cornell
West, reference is to Obama. "It's not pessimistic, brother, because
this is the blues. We are blues people. The blues aren't pessimistic.
We're prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.
That's different."

Rahawa Haile: Should Musicians Play Tel Aviv? This kicks around the
various reasons foreign musicians shouldn't play in Israel, with some
asides on other related cases -- apartheid-era South Africa, obviously,
but Haile also mentions concerts in "unsavory" dictatorships like Libya
(under Gaddafi) and Turkmenistan, plus Stevie Wonder's decision to not
bother with Florida after the Zimmerman verdict. Oddly, Haile spends
much more time on Israel's often rabid reaction to African refugees --
mostly from Sudan, where Israel tried to score anti-Arab propaganda
points -- than with Israel's second- or third-class treatment of
Palestinians (actually, those in Gaza are probably more like fourth).
(Max Blumenthal's book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
has quite a bit on Israeli racism against African refugees, but that
is just one instance of the more general loathing right-wing Israelis
hold for nearly all goyim.) Neil Tennant is quoted: "in Israel anyone
who buys a ticket can attend a concert." That, of course, depends on
what you mean by "in Israel": if you live in Ramallah, 15 miles away,
you can't buy tickets to see the Pet Shop Boys in Tel Aviv, nor can
you if you live in Gaza, more like 40 miles away. Tennant is not only
wrong, he is wrong in a particularly misleading way: his experience
of Israel is of a normal, relatively peaceful and prosperous society,
which is true enough for the "Tel Aviv bubble" but completely false
for much of the territory subject to Israeli state terror. One thing
that perpetuates Israeli state terror is the sense that its preferred
citizens enjoy of never having to pay a price for their consent to
living in such a state. When an international artists boycotts Israel,
that at least sends a message that there is some cost to running such
a state, even if it's not likely to have any real effect. The fact is
that Israel cannot be forced into changing its ways: the only way
change will come about is if Israelis become conscious of how far
their nation has strayed from international norms of peace and human
rights. For that reason I welcome all such boycotts. On the other
hand, I don't keep track of who played Israel when or why. (One of the
few I recall is Madonna, who made a documentary about a non-concert
trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories, which if I recall correctly
was very effective in exposing at least part of the brutality of the
regime.) Nor do I discriminate against Israeli jazz musicians -- I must
have written about close to 100 and I'd be surprised if the grade curve
strays from any other national group. They are individuals, and while
many may support their political leaders, many do not -- in fact a very
large percentage of them are expatriates, living in New York, London,
Paris, and elsewhere -- and in any case, as an American I know as well
as anyone that there is very little individuals can do about their
governments.

D.R. Tucker: The Powell Doctrine: Some notes on Lewis Powell,
including his notorious US Chamber of Commerce memo that largely
laid out the platform for right-wing business' takeover of American
politics, and other things, including a defense of Roe. vs. Wade.

Daily Log

Went to a memorial event for the late Alice Powell at the Peace Center.
They served tacos. She was a superb cook, and loved to invite people over
for political socializing; evidently tacos were one of her specialties in
LA, not that I remember them here. But I was asked to provide the ground
beef. Having never made tacos in my life, I looked up a recipe, and came
up with
this, from Emil Lagrasse:

Ingredients:

2 tbs olive oil

1.5 c onion, finely chopped

3 tbs minced garlic

3 tbs ground cumin

2 lbs ground beef

1 tsp ground chipotle pepper

1.5 tsp kosher salt

2 c beef broth

1/4 c tomato paste

Steps:

Heat large frying pan, and add olive oil and onions. Sauté until
translucent, 3-4 minutes. Add garlic and cumin and sauté until fragrant,
about 1 minute.

Add beef, breaking up pieces as they cook, until browned, about 8-10
minutes. Season with chipotle pepper and salt.

Dissolve tomato paste in beef broth, and add. Bring to a simmer,
starring occasionally until most of the liquid has evaporated, about
20 minutes. Remove and serve.

I used 3 lbs. ground round (15% fat), and "Better Than Bouillion"
for the stock. I don't think I quite scaled the garlic and cumin,
and cut back a bit on the chipotle pepper and salt. I boiled the
meat vigorously until the liquid evaporated.

I also tried a variation on this with 1 lb. ground turkey (about
7% fat). I substituted chicken stock, and added a little cinnamon
and paprika.

Rhapsody Streamnotes (August 2014)

Music Week

Not sure why the rated count slipped this past week -- maybe just
the drag of the server problems, not to mention the drag of all sorts
of everyday hassles. The server problem is that more often than not
the database connections used by the serendipity blog software have
failed (either not established or dropped), resulting in various cryptic
error messages or plain old indefinite hangs. The ISP (addr.com) has
been even more unresponsive, but through all this time (3-4 weeks now)
the server has been up, it's been serving static pages (i.e., everything
on the website below
ocston), although it's hard
for people to tell that when the root index is inaccessible. Moving
the whole blog to another database on another server is a huge and
daunting task -- one that I don't doubt will be necessary, but still
a ways away.

So it occurred to me that a short-term kluge around the database
problem would be to write up a bit of PHP code to manage the most
recent part of the blog with static files. I have that code sort of
working now, so I'll install it and replace the root index page with
something that will explain the problem and offer either the "real
blog" or the "fake blog" options. In the future, I will initially
install new posts using the "fake blog" system, then try the "real
blog." I may add some bells and whistles to the "fake blog," but
most likely it will just be a temporary bridging system until I can
get something stable working.

Trouble finding new A-list albums this week, although three (of four)
releases on Driff sorely tempted me -- I had given A- grades to the first
two Whammies albums, a Pandelis Karayorgis album (Mi3: Free Advice)
was a Jazz CG Pick Hit back in 2007, and Eric Hofbauer's The Blueprint
Project was an A- in 2003. But some combination of bad attitude and
excessive nitpicking held me back on all three -- as, by the way, it did
on the two Punk 45 compilations Jason Gubbels
praised last week (couldn't find the third on Rhapsody), and for that
matter the first two records after played after I closed this week's tally:
Steven Bernstein's Viper's Drag and Anna Webber's Simple.
The only new record to top A- was the Calypso comp Michael Tatum
wrote about last week -- I'm always a sucker for that beat and wordplay.
The other A- doesn't exist on Rhapsody, but I pieced together a mixer
list from other resources and came up with 47 (of 48) songs, close
enough. Still, I'm of two minds about the record. I can't knock so
many great songs, but I'm not sure how useful the compilation really
is, or whether I'd even want a copy. And I am sure that if I was the
sort of person who liked to put playlists together, I could easily
top The Best Punk Album in the World . . . Ever --
so much for the title.

Reviews on all these records are accumulating, and should trigger
a Rhapsody Streamnotes later this week -- assuming nothing else awful
happens in the meantime, these days pretty wishful thinking.

One aside: Publicist Matt Merewitz wrote today to nudge me on the
Lee Konitz First Meeting: Live in London Volume 1 album out in
June. I wrote back, and thought I might as well share this as it bears
repeating:

Got it, filed it as a high B+ (***), same as Enfants Terribles
from 2012, slightly better than Standards Live: At the Village Gate
(**) on Enja also this year. Could be he records too much and too casually
to get anyone excited -- I haven't graded anything by him A- since 1999's
Sound of Surprise (although I've missed a lot of albums in that
stretch). He continues to play at a very high level at a time when he
could just coast on his laurels -- his first really great album,
Subconscious-Lee, came out in 1950. I'm not a huge fan, but given
how much he's done for how long, I've voted for him for Downbeat's
HOF ballot four years straight -- really ridiculous that he hasn't been
voted in.

Punk 45: Underground Punk in the United States of America, Vol. 1: Kill the Hippies! Kill Yourself! The American Nation Destroys Its Young (1973-80 [2014], Soul Jazz): pre-Reagan US punk obscurities, not nearly as destructive or incendiary as the compilers would like to think [r]: B+(***)

Punk 45: Underground Punk and Post-Punk in the UK 1977-81, Vol. 2: There Is No Such Thing as Society: Get a Job, Get a Car, Get a Bed, Get Drunk! (1977-81 [2014], Soul Jazz): UK punk obscurities, surprisingly catchy in their neoprimitive ways, their social doom and gloom more earned [r]: B+(***)

Old records rated this week:

The Best Punk Album in the World . . . Ever! (1975-84 [1995], Virgin, 2CD): Sex Pistols, no Clash, but lots of famous songs, more new wave than punk [r]: A-

Weekend Roundup

It's been a very distracting week, what with the blog sometimes working
and more often not. I've been working on a "pseudo-blog" system that should
prove more robust -- throughout the troubles of the last few weeks we've
always been able to serve static pages -- and I should unveil that soon.
Meanwhile, a few scattered links this week:

When the concept of SWAT arose out of the Philadelphia and Los Angeles
Police Departments, it was quickly picked up by big city police officials
nationwide. Initially, however, it was an elite force reserved for uniquely
dangerous incidents, such as active shooters, hostage situations, or
large-scale disturbances.

Nearly a half-century later, that's no longer true.

In 1984, according to Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop,
about 26% of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT
teams. By 2005, that number had soared to 80% and it's still rising,
though SWAT statistics are notoriously hard to come by.

As the number of SWAT teams has grown nationwide, so have the raids.
Every year now, there are approximately 50,000 SWAT raids in the United
States, according to Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University's
School of Justice Studies. In other words, roughly 137 times a day a SWAT
team assaults a home and plunges its inhabitants and the surrounding
community into terror.

In a recently released report, "War Comes Home," the American Civil
Liberties Union (my employer) discovered that nearly 80% of all SWAT
raids it reviewed between 2011 and 2012 were deployed to execute a
search warrant.

You can draw a couple short lines from the US counterinsurgency wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq to militarized policing: one is that surplus
military equipment is often dumped no charge onto police departments
(Tom Engelhardt starts with a story about the Bergen County Police
Dept. obtaining MRAPs -- armored personnel carriers designed to
survive IED attacks.) Another is the relatively high percentage of
ex-soldiers in police departments. Another is lack of accountability:
with the cult of the troops, it's virtually impossible for the US
military to hold any of its personnel accountable for unnecessary or
excessive force, and as the police become militarized that ethic (or
lack thereof) carries over. (Israel, which used to pride itself on
discipline, has lately become as bad or worse.) Then there's the
increasing proliferation of guns (and "stand your ground" laws) in
the general population. Harwood starts with a story of a Florida man
who heard through social media that he was going to be "burned."
When the man called the police with the threat, he was told to get
a gun and defend himself. The threat arrived in the form of a SWAT
team sent to serve a search warrant: seeing the gun, they killed
the man. Harwood titles one section, "Being the police means never
having to say you're sorry."

Elias Isquith: Reagan is still killing us: How his dangerous "American
exceptionalism" haunts us today: Always good to read a bad word
about "the Gipper," but this piece is more about Hillary Clinton and
her recent
neocon unveiling in the Atlantic. She's always been eager to
show how bellicose she can be, and it certainly doesn't hurt to
put some distance between herself and Obama, especially as long
as she takes positions that don't get tested in practice. But
before going into her, and back to Reagan, I'm reminded of how
Gordon Goldstein, in Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the
Path to War in Vietnam, quoted Bundy on the contrast between
JFK and LBJ: "Kennedy didn't want to be dumb, Johnson didn't want
to be a coward." In this, it's tempting to map Obama onto Kennedy,
and Clinton onto Johnson. Except that Obama doesn't want to be
seen as a coward either, so time and again he backs down and goes
with dumb. Clinton is only promising to get to dumb faster.

Weirdly, Clinton's decision to speak about the U.S.'s role in global
politics as if she, in contrast to Obama, was an unapologetic,
"old-fashioned" believer in American exceptionalism made her sound
like no one so much as Ronald Reagan, the last president who told
a humbled America to buck up and forget its recent mistakes.
[ . . . ]

So here's a prediction about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 presidential
race. At one point or another, there will be a television ad in which
Hillary Clinton will speak of bringing back the former glory of the
United States. She'll say it's time to mark an end to nearly 20 years
of terrorism, depression, war and defeat. It's time to feel good again
about being the leader of the free world. It's morning in America; and
everything is great.

Actually, that sounds like a good idea, especially if she could
combine it with a policy shift that gets away from the losing struggles
of the last twenty years. One of the interesting things about Reagan
is that with a few minor exceptions -- wasting a lot of money on the
military and helping turn Afghanistan and Central America into the
hellholes they are today -- Reagan was satisfied with "talking the
talk" and rarely pushed it too far. For instance, he spent all of
1980 campaigning against Carter's Panama Canal Zone treaty, but once
he was elected he didn't lift a finger to change it. On the other
hand, Clinton won't be given a pass on her toughness. She'll have
to earn it. How successful she may be will depend on how accurately
she identifies the malevolent forces that have been dragging America
down: namely, the Republicans, and their pandering to the rich and
crazy.

Israel's repeated claim that it targets only rocket launchers or tunnels
is belied by the scale and nature of the weapons it unloaded on Gaza.
Its 2000-pound aerial bombs take down entire buildings along with everyone
in them (almost a thousand buildings have been severely damaged or destroyed
in such air strikes). Its 155mm howitzer shells have a margin of error of
300 yards and a lethal radius of up to 150 yards from the point of impact.
Each of the 120mm flechette shells its tank crews fire burst into a 100
by 300 yard shower of 5,000 metal darts carefully designed to shred human
flesh.

Having sealed Gaza off from the outside world and blanketed almost half
of the territory with warnings telling people to flee for their lives (to
where?!), Israel has been indiscriminately firing all of these munitions
into one of the most densely-inhabited parts of our planet. Entire
neighborhoods have been leveled; entire families have been entombed
in the ruins of their homes. The catastrophic result of Israel's
bombardment is no surprise.

No surprise -- but also not exactly thought through either; more a
matter of casual disregard. For it's not as though Israel has carried
out this violence in pursuit of a strategic master plan (its endless
prevarications over its objectives in Gaza are the clearest indicator
of this). Such gratuitous outbursts of violence (this episode is the
third in six years) are, rather, what Israel falls back on in place of
the strategic vision of which it is bereft. It can indulge in these
outbursts partly because, in the short run at least -- endlessly
coddled by the United States, where venal politicians are quick to
parrot its self-justifications -- it does not pay a significant price
for doing so.

Sandy Tolan: Going Wild in the Gaza War: "Going wild" was Tzipi Livni's
description of how Israel reacts to any Palestinian provocation they bother
to react to. The idea is to overreact so viciously and indiscriminately
that the Palestinians will learn to fear offending Israel in any way,
settling meekly into their role as "an utterly defeated people." The 2014
edition of "going wild" -- by no means finished yet -- has left over 1,900
Palestinians dead, over 12,000 injured, some 100,000 homeless, many more
displaced, pretty much all of 1.8 million people without power or many of
the other amenities of civilization, like the ability to shop in the
globalized marketplace, or to take a holiday more than 20 miles from
home. Those 1.8 million people have certainly been reminded of Israel's
carelessness and cruelty. It's hard to see that as a lesson that bodes
well for the future. Tolan's first point is that this war could easily
have been avoided had Israel and/or the US recognized and worked with
Hamas, and he steps through a series of initiatives and "truce" offers
that were summarily rejected by Israel and the US -- to this day they
insist that "once a terrorist, always a terrorist" (to which Tolan
can't help but point out that the leaders responsible "for a horrific
massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and the Irgun
bombing of the King David Hotel, killing 91 people" subsequently
became Prime Ministers of Israel). Tolan regards Israel as "a deeply
traumatized society whose profound anxieties are based in part on
genuine acts of horror perpetrated by countless terrorist attacks
over decades, and partly on an unspeakable past history of Europe."

Tragically, Israeli fears have created a national justification for
a kind of "never again" mentality gone mad, in which leaders find it
remarkably easy to justify ever more brutal acts against ever more
dehumanized enemies. At the funeral for the three slain teens,
Benjamin Netanyahu declared, "May God avenge their blood." An Israeli
Facebook page, "The People of Israel Demand Revenge," quickly garnered
35,000 likes. A member of the Knesset from a party in the nation's
ruling coalition posted an article by Netanyahu's late former chief
of staff that called for the killing of "the mothers of [Palestinian]
martyrs" and the demolition of their homes: "Otherwise, more little
snakes will be raised there."

On NPR, Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., decried the
"culture of terrorism" in Palestinian society, adding: "You're
talking about savage actions . . . In the case of
Israel, we take legitimate actions of self-defense, and sometimes,
unintentionally, Palestinian civilians are harmed." That day, the
Palestinian teenager Mohammed Khdeir was abducted and burned alive,
and soon afterward, Israel began bombing Gaza.

Within Israel, the act of dehumanization has become institutionalized.
These days, Israeli newspapers generally don't even bother to print the
names, when known, or the stories of the children being killed in Gaza.
When B'tselem, the respected Israeli human rights organization, attempted
to take out an advertisement on Israeli radio naming names, the request
was denied. The content of the ad, censors declared, was "politically
controversial."

Actually, Israel is more schizophrenic than Tolan admits. One thing
you notice over history is the extreme contrast between the confidence
(to the point of arrogance) of Israel's top security officials (both
in the military and in organizations like Shin Bet) and the dread held
by large segments of public. No doubt that scaring the people lets the
elites do what they want, but that's as much due to the one thing that
both agree on, which is that Israeli Jews are different and infinitely
more valuable than anyone else. Their specialness, after all, is the
whole point of "the Jewish State." Once you believe that, there is no
limit to the dehumanization of others.

Dylan Scott: For All the Hype, Does Israel's Iron Dome Even Work?:
"The essence of his analysis is this: Iron Dome's missiles almost never
approached Hamas's rockets at the right trajectory to destroy the
incoming rocket's warhead. . . . And if the warhead
is not destroyed, but merely knocked off course, the warhead will
likely still explode when it lands, putting lives and property in
danger." The underlying fact is that Hamas' rockets almost never do
any substantial damage whether they are intercepted or not, and since
they are unguided, deflecting them has no appreciable effect on their
accuracy (or lack thereof). One question I still haven't seen any
reports on is what happens when the shrapnel from Iron Dome rockets
lands. As I recall, in 1991 Israel's US-provided Patriot anti-missile
system did about as much damage as the Iraqi Scuds they were trying
to defend against. That was a heavier system, but another difference
was that Israel's censors had less interest in suppressing reports
of Patriot failures and blowback. Part of the significance of Iron
Dome is that it exemplifies Israel's unilateralist strategy -- Ben
Gurion's dictum that "it only matters what the Jews do" -- so any
failure is not just a technical problem but a flaw in the strategy.
Even if Iron Dome were 85% effective, that would still be a lower
success rate than could be achieved by a truce. Also see:
Or Amit: Checking under Israel's Iron Dome.

Stephen Franklin: Lawyer: 'We Should Stay on the Parapets and Keep
Fighting': The lawyer interviewed here is Thomas Geoghegan,
argues both that the labor movement is essential ("People who talk
about maintaining the welfare state without a labor movement behind
it are kidding themselves. You will not be able to have a full-employment
economy without a labor movement") as is working through the courts
("We don't have majority-rule here. We have a lot of gridlock, and
lots of checks and balances. Over the years, to break gridlock, you
do rely upon the courts to come in from the outside").

Paul Krugman: Secular Stagnation: The Book: Funny name for the
condition where economies don't bounce back from recessions but drag
on with higher unemployment rates and negligible growth for many
years -- Japan in the 1990s now looks like merely an early example
of a more general trend. There's a new
VoxEU ebook with essays on this, something the US is very much
affected by at the moment. Krugman explains more
here:

And let me simply point out that liquidity-trap analysis has been
overwhelmingly successful in its predictions: massive deficits didn't
drive up interest rates, enormous increases in the monetary base didn't
cause inflation, and fiscal austerity was associated with large declines
in output and employment.

What secular stagnation adds to the mix is the strong possibility
that this Alice-through-the-looking-glass world is the new normal, or
at least is going to be the way the world looks a lot of the time. As
I say in my own contribution to the VoxEU book, this raises problems
even for advocates of unconventional policies, who all too often
predicate their ideas on the notion that normality will return in
the not-too-distant future. It raises even bigger problems with
people and institutions that are eager to "normalize" fiscal and
monetary policy, slashing deficits and raising rates; normalizing
policy in a world where normal isn't what it used to be is a recipe
for disaster.

Martin Longman: On Rick Perry's Indictments: I just wanted to take
note of the occasion. It's rare that sitting governors get indicted for
anything, and I don't expect much is going to come out of this. Perry's
supporters are not only likely to see them as politically motivated,
they're likely to take that a proof that Perry's their kind of
politician -- one not above getting his hands dirty.

Music Week

I've been struggling with MySQL database performance problems at my
ISP (ADDR.COM), and got a frightful scare this morning when I realized
they not only aren't responding to trouble reports, their "live chat"
and "callback" service options are broken, and worst of all I got a
message that they're not accepting phone calls. The static pages on
the website continue to be served. I can login, update my files, and
sometimes even login to the MySQL server. I week or so ago I was able
to get an almost complete mysqldump of the blog database, but in three
files as I went through the grind table-by-table, and in the end one
table was hopelessly lost. Looking at the code that accesses that table,
I decided that there's nothing important there, and tried hacking the
code to avoid the table. Then I dropped and rebuilt the table, which
didn't seem to help but is certainly cleaner. I also tried thinning
out the very large "exits" table, which again isn't really useful --
unless one gets obsessive about user use patterns, and I'm not sure
even then.

But late today the blog seemed to be working OK, so I posted
yesterday's Weekend Update and if luck holds I'll follow up with
this post. I'm not under any illusions that this will continue to
work, or that I want to continue to do business with ADDR.COM. So
I'm working on a couple of things to replant the site. The static
pages are no problem, since I have a complete clone of them on a
local machine. The blog is a problem in that it's updated on the
server and not replicated elsewhere. I use a piece of free software
called "serendipity" for it, and it has evolved quite a bit since
I last updated the server. So for it I need to download a new copy,
then figure out how the database dumps fit in with the new code.
I also need to decide whether I want to continue using that code --
I've started using the competing "wordpress" code for other blog
projects, mostly because it looks to be easier to train other people
to use, and also because it seems to be simpler to keep up to date.
And I need to decide whether to move the website to my "hullworks"
server -- which has had its own problems lately -- or to go with
another virtual server deal.

As a transition strategy, I'm working on a very simple version
of blog software, one that uses the file system for storage and a
small amount of PHP code to grease the wheels. I have some of it
working now, will get more of it tonight, and if need be -- e.g.,
if I can't post this tonight -- I should be able to put it into
use (with a limited data set and no comments or RSS feeds) tomorrow.
Right now the main problem is figuring out how to use Apache URI
rewrite rules, but that's only necessary to view single posts with
more/less compatible pathnames. The bigger problem will be how much
old data to collect under what should be temporary riggings.

But enough about my problems. Just finished a pretty productive
music week, bringing the Rhapsody Streamnotes draft file up to 56
records (41+1+14). The two A- new jazz records were finds on the
outstanding Swiss Intakt label -- one I hadn't noticed from 2013.
Intakt also provided two A- old jazz records by Japanese-German
pianist Aki Takase (the third A- Takase is on Leo, again accessible
to me only through Rhapsody). The Nobu Stowe records had fallen
through the cracks from a couple years back. (He's not even listed
in Penguin Guide -- their loss.) I'm not normally such a
piano fan, so this week is something of a fluke.

Weekend Roundup

Some scattered links this week:

Phyllis Bennis: Obama's Iraq airstrikes could actually help the Islamic
State, not weaken it: Could be -- at any rate they will more clearly
align the US as the enemy of Islam, a meme that's already in fairly broad
circulation both there and here (although thus far only Osama bin Laden
bothered to construct the "far enemy" theory to strike at the US -- most
Jihadists prefer to fight their local devils). For example, TPM reports:
Graham Urges Obama Act in Iraq, Syria to Prevent Terrorist Attack in US --
he actually means "to produce terrorist attack in US" since no one in Iraq
or Syria would be sufficiently motivated to attack the US unless the US
was acting in their own countries. Of course, the idea that the only way
to prevent something is to motivate it is a peculiar affliction of the
fascist mindset, rooted not in logic but in the taste for blood. (Speaking
of warmongers, TPM also reports,
Clinton Knocks Obama's 'Don't Do Stupid Stuff' Foreign Policy Approach
on Syria -- lest anyone think that if given the chance she would flinch
from doing "stupid stuff." In another TPM report,
Shock and Awe, Josh Marshall quotes an anonymous long-time Iraq
war consultant on ISIS tactics -- similar to Taliban tactics right down
to the shiny new Toyota pickups -- and suggests that Obama will see
some initial successes against ISIS frontal attacks, at least until
they adjust. I've noted before his the first flush of US airpower and
advanced weapons creates a false sense of invincibility, "the feel-good
days of the war," which soon ends as "the enemy" adjusts tactics and
as the US blunders from atrocity to atrocity. So, pace Bennis, the
short-run game is likely to look good to the hawks, and being hawks
they're unlikely to ever look at something that produces perpetual war
as having a downside. No, the problem with Bennis' piece is that she
want to argue US policy in Iraq on the basis of what it means to Iraqis,
instead of the affect intervening in Iraq will have in the US. Foreign
wars are catnip for the right because they propagate hate and violence
and they show the government doing nothing to make American lives better
(even the ruse that they create jobs has worn thin).

And, of course, there's always the oil angle: see,
Steve Coll: Oil and Erbil. So far, Obama has been more active
in defending Kurdish autonomy than backing Iraq's central government.
Coincidentally, ExxonMobil and Chevron have made major deals with
the Kurds, bypassing the central government. Favorite line here:
"ExxonMobil declined to comment."

Erbil's rulers never quite saw the point of a final compromise with
Baghdad's Shiite politicians -- as each year passed, the Kurds got
richer on their own terms, they attracted more credible and deep-pocketed
oil companies as partners, and they looked more and more like they led
a de-facto state. The Obama Administration has done nothing to reverse
that trend.

And so, in Erbil, in the weeks to come, American pilots will defend
from the air a capital whose growing independence and wealth has loosened
Iraq's seams, even while, in Baghdad, American diplomats will persist
quixotically in an effort to stitch that same country together to confront
ISIS.

Obama's defense of Erbil is effectively the defense of an undeclared
Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal -- as a long-term,
non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example -- are best
not spoken of in polite or naïve company, as Al Swearengen [a reference
back to HBO's series, Deadwood] would well understand. Life,
Swearengen once pointed out, is often made up of "one vile task after
another." So is American policy in Iraq.

Elias Isquith: Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback on his growing unpopularity:
It's Obama's fault! Brownback won the Republican Party nomination
last week, with a 63-37 margin over Jennifer Winn. Winn had no political
experience, and no money. Her campaign was managed by a libertarian who
came out not of the Tea Party but the Occupy movement. Winn's primary
motivation for running was the experience and sense of injustice she
felt when her son was arrested for drugs. A big part of her platform
was calling for legalization of marijuana. She was not, in other words,
a natural fit with any identifiable fragment of the Republican Party in
Kansas, and still Brownback -- a sitting governor, two-term Senator,
former Congressman, rich, pious, with a postcard family, someone who's
never faced a closely contested election in his life -- still couldn't
run up a two-to-one margin among his own people. So, yeah, he should
take the result as a wake-up call. Instead, he explained:

"I think a big part of it is Barack Obama," Brownback said, referring
to his only securing two-thirds of the primary vote. "[A] lot of people
are so irritated at what the president is doing, they want somebody to
throw a brick."

Brownback continued: "I think it's a lot of deep irritation with the
way the president has taken the country, so much so that people are so
angry about it they're just trying to express it somehow."

Why Kansas voters would be so irrational as to punish Brownback, who
in many ways represents everything Obama does not, for the president's
sins, the governor did not say.

Having just suffered through a big-money Republican primary, it's
obvious that Republicans in Kansas are totally convinced that everyone
in the country (well, except, you know, for them) utterly can't
stand Obama or anything associated with him (especially "Obamacare"),
so they've concluded that the sure path to election is to go as far
over the top in denouncing Obama as possible. But just working yourself
up into ever greater levels of hysteria doesn't make that claim any
more credible. On the other hand, Brownback has nearly wrecked the
state government he was entrusted with nearly four years ago, and
he can hardly blame what he did on anyone else.

John Cassidy: Memo to Obama's Critics: He's Not Callow Anymore
has an explanation why Republicans have turned up the vitriol against
Obama, what with the Republican House suing the president while many
among them talk of impeachment: "But it isn't his inexperience and
glibness that's infuriating them. It's the fact that he's learned to
play the Washington power game, and, perhaps, found a way to go around
them." What Obama's done with all that executive power hasn't been
very impressive -- except in Israel-Iraq-Syria-Ukraine foreign policy,
where every step he's taken has been wrong, something Cassidy doesn't
appreciate -- but Republicans were so used to pushing Obama around
that any attempt to call their bluff is seen as a calamity. (I am, by
the way, not very happy with Cassidy's recent posts on the four ISIU
wars, nor his defense of Obama in them. Nor are the Republicans much
concerned there, except inasmuch as they can paint Obama as weak.
Too bad: when they impeached Clinton way back when, I wrote that I
would have cast a guilty vote, not on the basis of the charges but
due to his mishandling of Iraq. Obama is little if any better now.)

Ed Kilgore: The Tea Party Is Losing Battles but Winning the War: Kansas
Senator Pat Roberts, so well ensconced in Washington he no longer bothers
to own or rent any residency in the state he represents, defeated a rather
weird Tea Party challenger named Milton Wolf by a 48-41 margin: Wolf's sound
bite description of Roberts was "liberal in Washington, rarely in Kansas."
Roberts had never been accused of being a RINO, but fearing Wolf's challenge
he became noticeably more dilligent about his conservative bona fides over
the last year (before that he was mostly known for routing federal money
to agribusiness interests). So Kilgore chalks this up as yet another case
of the Tea Party moving the Republican Party to the right even when they
fail to get their crackpots nominated. (Wolf, an orthopedist, reportedly
had a nasty habit of posting his patients' X-rays on Facebook along with
denigrating "humorous" comments.)

Ed Kilgore: The "New" Rick Perry: "New" as in he's distancing himself
from the "old" Perry who self-destructed in the 2012 presidential race,
presumably to run again in 2016.

As for Perry's famous message of presenting Texas as an economic template
for the country, I think it's a mistake to view this as easy, non-controversial
mainline GOP rap that the rest of us can live with. What Perry exemplifies
is the ancient southern approach to economic development based on systematic
abasement of public policy in order to make life as profitable and easy as
possible for "job-creators," at any cost. If it sort of "works" (if you don't
care about poverty and low wage rates and inadequate health care and
deliberately starved public resources) in Texas thanks in no small part to
the state's fossil fuel wealth and low housing costs (though as Philip
Longman
demonstrated
in the April/May issue of WaMo, even that level of success is debatable),
it sure hasn't ever "worked" in similarly inclined but less blessed places
like Mississippi and Alabama, where the local aristocracy has been preaching
the same gospel for many decades.

Democrats and Republicans advocate different solutions to inequality,
but both seek to shift financial risk from the state to the individual.
Republicans promote the "ownership society," in which privatizing social
insurance, removing investor protections and expanding home ownership
align the interests of workers with the anti-regulatory interests of the
wealthy. Democrats focus on education and on helping the poor build wealth
through savings programs. These approaches demand greater personal
responsibility for market risks and failures, further discrediting the
state's role in regulating markets and providing public social insurance.

Instead of just giving people more purchasing power, we should be taking
basic needs off the market altogether.

Consider Social Security, a wildly popular program that doesn't count
toward individual wealth. If Social Security were replaced with a private
savings account, individuals would have more "wealth" (because they would
have their own financial account) but less actual security. The elderly
would have to spin the financial-markets roulette wheel and suffer
destitution if they were unlucky. This is why social-wealth programs
like Social Security combat inequality more powerfully than any
privatized, individualized wealth-building "solution."

Public programs like universal healthcare and free education function
the same way, providing social wealth directly instead of hoping to boost
people's savings enough to allow them to afford either. Rather than
requiring people to struggle with a byzantine system of private health
insurance, universal healthcare would be available to cover the costs
of genuine health needs. Similarly, broadly accessible higher education
would allow people to thrive without taking on massive student loans and
hoping that their "human capital" investment helps them hit the jackpot.

Emphasis added to the key point. Aside from moving basic needs off
market, we would also be moving them into the realm of society-guaranteed
rights. Also, from optional (something enjoyed by an elite) to mandatory
(something securely available to all). Conversely, the political agenda
of trying to impose greater market discipline over any area of life is
meant to increase inequality, and to make its consequences more acute.

Paul Krugman: Libertarian Fantasies: I've always had sympathies for
libertarian thinking: the lessons of the "don't tread on me" American
Revolution were imprinted early, and the notion that the state was out
to keep me from enjoying "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
was backed by clear evidence from my teens, most perniciously through
the draft and the drug war. However, I eventually realized that while
self-interested public menaces like J. Edgar Hoover occasionally worked
in the public sector they tended to be the exception, in corporations
they were the rule, so ubiquitous that their corruption lapped over
and gnawed at the very idea of public service. But things like the
continuing drug war show that there is a need for libertarian types.
Unfortunately, they rarely stop at defending freedom from real threats.
Many become obsessed with false threats, and have no clue how to go
from critique to policy, mostly because their anti-government bias
blinds them from the possibility of using government for increasing
freedom. (For instance, I'd say that the FDA increases my freedom as
a consumer by saving me time worrying about contaminated food. You
might say that the FDA limits the freedom of food producers to cut
costs and poison people, but there are a lot more of us than them,
and regulation is a fairly efficient scheme to even out minimal
quality costs and avoid a disastrous "race to the bottom.") Krugman
has his own examples, concluding:

In other words, libertarianism is a crusade against problems we don't
have, or at least not to the extent the libertarians want to imagine.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of monetary policy,
where many libertarians are determined to stop the Fed from irresponsible
money-printing -- which is not, in fact, something it's doing.

And what all this means in turn is that libertarianism does not
offer a workable policy agenda. I don't mean that I dislike the agenda,
which is a separate issue; I mean that if we should somehow end up with
libertarian government, it would quickly find itself unable to fulfill
any of its promises.

I read a lot of Murray Rothbard way back when, and he actually spent
a lot of time coming up with private sector solutions to functions like
justice that are invariably performed by government. I easily understand
why a public justice system may become corrupt and repressive -- traits
ours exhibits way too often -- but I couldn't see how Rothbard's scheme
could every work, even badly. Rothbard's cases for private firefighters
and other services were more workable, but everything he came up was
vastly more inefficient than what we already have.

Let's talk about Gaza. The Gaza strip is not a nest of murderers; it's
not even a nest of wasps. It is not home to incessant rampage and murder.
Most of its children were not born to kill, nor do most of its mothers
raise martyrs -- what they want for their children is exactly what most
Israeli mothers want for their own children. Its leaders are not so
different from Israel's, not in the extent of their corruption, their
penchant for "luxury hotels" nor even in their allocating most of the
budget to defense.

Gaza is a stricken enclave, a permanent disaster zone, from 1948 to
2014, and most of its inhabitants are third- and fourth-time refugees.
Most of the people who revile and who destroy the Gaza Strip have never
been there, certainly not as civilians. For eight years I have been
prevented from going there; during the preceding 20 years I visited
often. I liked the Gaza Strip, as much as one can like an afflicted
region. I liked its people, if I may be permitted to make a generalization.
There was a spirit of almost unimaginable determination, along with an
admirable resignation to its woes.

In recent years Gaza has become a cage, a roofless prison surrounded
by fences. Before that it was also bisected. Whether or not they are
responsible for their situation, these are ill-fated people, a great
many people and a great deal of misery. [ . . . ]

But in Hebrew, "Gaza," pronounced 'Aza, is short for Azazel, which
is associated with hell. Of the multitude of curses hurled at me these
days from every street corner, "Go to hell/Gaza" is among the gentler
ones. Sometimes I want to say in response, "I wish I could go to Gaza,
in order to fulfill my journalistic mission." And sometimes I even want
to say: "I wish you could all go to Gaza. If only you knew what Gaza is,
and what is really there."

Andrew O'Hehir: Is Obama haunted by Bush's ghost -- or possessed by him?
Lots of things have bothered me about Obama, but his disinterest to put
any real distance between his administration and the Bush one on issues
of war, peace, and security is foremost -- all the more so because by the
time Bush left office those policies had been shown to be utterly bankrupt,
and because Obama was elected with a clear mandate for change.

As we were reminded earlier this week, Obama's efforts to separate his
own management of intelligence and spycraft from the notorious torture
policies of Bush's "war on terror" now look exceedingly murky, if not
downright mendacious. Throughout his campaigns and presidential years,
Obama has relied on shadow-men like former CIA director George Tenet,
former counterterrorism chief and current CIA director John Brennan
and director of national intelligence (and spinner of lies to Congress)
James Clapper, all of whom are implicated to the eyeballs in "extraordinary
rendition" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the other excesses
of the Bush regime. [ . . . ] Despite all the things
he said to get elected, and beneath all the stylistic and symbolic elements
of his presidency, Obama has chosen to continue the most fundamental
policies of the Bush administration. In some areas, including drone
warfare, government secrecy and the persecution of whistle-blowers, and
the outsourcing of detainee interrogation to third-party nations, Obama
has expanded Bush's policies.

Stephen M Walt: Do No (More) Harm: Subtitle: "Every time the U.S.
touches the Middle East, it makes things worse. It's time to walk away
and not look back." Good argument, but could use a better article.
Walt's list of all the things that have gone wrong is detailed and
long enough, but when he tries to apply his "realist" paradigm he
doesn't come with any clear sense of the American interests in the
region that he assumes must exist. (Closest he comes is the desire
to keep any [other] nation from controlling the Persian Gulf oil
belt, which at the moment is so fragmented it hardly calls for any
US action at all. He misses what strike me as the two obvious ones:
peace and a sense of equality and justice throughout the region,
which would in turn undercut past/current trends toward militant
and repressive Islam.) He rejects isolationism, but that may well
be the best solution one can hope for given how pathological US
intervention has been. (After all, alcoholics are advised to quit,
rather than just scale back to the occasional drink non-alcoholics
can handle without harm.) He does suggest that the US give up on
trying to guide any sort of "peace process" between Israel and the
Palestinians. Indeed, he goes to far as to say that we shouldn't
bother with Israel's imperious fantasies if that's what they want
to do -- evidently being a "realist" means you never have to think
in terms of principles. On the other hand, isn't such a total lack
of scruples a big part of how the US became the Middle East plague
it so clearly is?

Israel/Palestine links:

Kate: Three Palestinian men killed in separate West Bank protests, one
outside a Jewish settlement: a long, depth-ful compendium of links
and stories all around the conflict. Regarding the title incidents,
I recall that the second ("Al-Aqsa") intifada started in response to
Israel killing a dozen or so Palestinian demonstrators. I always
thought that should have been called the "Shaul Moffaz Intifada,"
in honor of the murderer-in-chief (then-IDF chief-of-staff). One
article notes: "More than 1,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel were
arrested by Israeli police during Operation Protective Edge, according
to a lawyer representing a number of the detainees. While some were
arrested for protesting the Israeli military incursion into Gaza,
dozens were held without charge." Another article called for "the
establishment of camps modeled after the internment camps the United
States established in World War II" for anti-war "agitators" (names
included Gideon Levy, Haneen Zoabi, and Amira Haas). Also, an earlier
compendium by Kate:
After destroying 10,000 homes, Israel says Gaza can rebuild if it
disarms.

Falguni Sheth: The West' selective amnesia: Gaza, the war on terror and
the paradox of human rights: Starts by citing the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a document from a period when the
world was exhausted by war and prescient enough to understand that the
key to peace is treating people right. Those aspirations have fallen
by the wayside, both as various nations came to view their interests
as depending on trodding on human rights -- a reassertion of the
imperialist mindset that led to two world wars -- and the self-defense
doctrine, which holds that one's own self-defense is so critical that
it allows one to act against other nations and peoples with impunity.
(Sheth's term for this is FLOP, an acronym for Fuck the Lives of Other
People.) Israel is the paradigm for that doctrine, although it has
been invoked by other countries when they thought they could get away
with it -- the US reaction to 9/11 is a prime example.

Daily Log

Wrote the following in a letter, my first pass to try to pull together
thoughts on Robert Christgau's unpublished memoir:

Finished reading Bob's memoir. I got mentioned three times, each
time in a laundry list (Riffs contributors, people who moved to New
York, friends who got married in the early '80s). Nothing on Laura,
but Ellin Hirst wound up with close to five brief mentions (once as
part of the "Ell*ns" with Willis). Lots of long name-dropping
sections, where hundreds of people move in and out very fast. Georgia
had less than ten mentions -- I don't think any carried into a second
sentence. Mentions brother Doug less but with more feeling. Greil
Marcus and Marshall Berman get a lot of deference as serious thinkers;
also Willis. Talks a lot about his/her "theory of pop" but never
explains it, and I doubt that it really is a theory -- more like an
attitude, self-validating because it comes down to various personal
pleasure points. (Reminds me that we never had any deep theory
discussions. We mostly just talked about what we liked and didn't. I
can imagine him going deeper with Marcus given their shared
pan-Americanism and with Berman given their shared pan-Bohemianism,
although both strike me as rather shallow.) He takes 6-10 diversions
into various pieces of art-crit -- Yeats' poetry, Dreiser and Stead
novels, "Mumbo Jumbo," Tom Wesselman's pop-nudes, Steely Dan and
Television -- not much more than two pages on any of them. Seems like
it speeds up to a blur from about 1975 on, especially in the early
1980s (which I know less about). Ends with Nina's adoption in 1985,
totaling about 230 pages -- figure he negotiated the length and wrote
to it. One thing that occurs to me is that I wish he had more on Perry
Brandston (his "designated teenager," a rather unique part of his
approach to reporting).

Downbeat Readers Poll

I was queried the other day about the deadline for Downbeat's
[79th] annual readers poll. Not sure when it is, but voting is currently
open (link).
I vote in their Critics Poll, which takes a lot more work: we generally
pick three candidates in each category, and there are "rising star"
subcategories (formerly "talents deserving wider recognition"), but
less work means less trouble, so I voted anyway. If you have any degree
of interest and expertise, you should too. If you want to compare notes,
mine follow:

Hall of Fame: Lee Konitz. He's 87, and the leading
candidate for the past decade. What, you want he should die first?
Isn't it bad enough you voted for Pat Metheny last year? Others,
la crème de la crème on the ballot: Han Bennink, Anthony
Braxton, Don Cherry, Tommy Flanagan, Abdullah Ibrahim, Illinois
Jacquet, Misha Mengelberg, Tito Puente, George Russell, Tomasz
Stanko. Baseball HOF thinkers divide between ultra-exclusivists
(who doubt that Sam Rice or Al Kaline were really such big stars)
and more-inclusivists (who are more likely to think that Bid McPhee
and Bill Mazeroski got snubbed). I've usually aligned with the
latter (McPhee at least, but maybe not Mazeroski: both era-defining
fielders, but the latter didn't have much bat, except on the day
he broke my 10-year-old heart). So, sure, many more good names on
the ballot -- more than they'll ever get to at the rate of two
per year.

Jazz Album (June 2013-May 2014):Roswell Rudd: Trombone
for Lovers (Sunnyside '13). Off ballot (and I'm very surprised
by this, because the label tends to finish very well in polls but also
the artist has earned a real following): Steve Lehman Octet: Mise en
Abîme (Pi '14). [PS: Release date turns out ot be June 24,
so the record is eligible next year. I was assuming that everything in
my 2014 list is eligible for the
ballot, but some of those records were released after May 31, so the
lower percentage of 2014 A-list on the ballot should be expected.] I
have three other full-A albums listed from the period: William Parker:
Wood Flute Songs (AUM Fidelity); Paul Shapiro: Shofarot
Verses (Tzadik); and Digital Primitives: Lipsomuch/Soul
Searchin' (Hopscotch) -- only Parker is on the ballot.

Historical Album (Released June 2013-May 2014):Art Pepper:
Unreleased Art Vol. VIII: Live at the Winery (Widow's Taste).
Despite my long interest in Recycled Goods, I get very few "historical"
albums: only 10 of the 42 (23.8%) on the ballot. Given this small sample,
I won't bother with grade breakdowns (other than to note that I had 4 A-
records), or whatever competitive off ballot records I had (other than
one A- this year: Enrico Pieranunzi: Play Morricone 1 & 2).

Soprano Sax:Evan Parker. On ballot: Jan Garbarek,
Vinny Golia, Bob Wilber. I'm not quite ready to add Dave Liebman,
but he tries hard and has become notably more tolerable in the last
couple years. Off ballot: Brent Jensen. Few specialists, and nearly
everyone plays better on larger saxes (including Parker).

Looking over my ballot, I'll note several things. One is that I
always went with someone on the ballot, even though in a couple slots
a write-in might be the better candidate. I do more write-ins in the
Critics Poll, but figure the larger voting population here makes them
even more invisible (plus they take more time than it's worth). Also,
sometimes I skipped the player I generally take as best-established
to pick out someone I'm especially fond of (e.g., Eskelin over Murray
at tenor sax). Third, in the thinner categories I just grabbed someone
and didn't sweat the details. If I filled out the ballot again tomorrow
I'd probably make some changes. Indeed, from last year, I changed: Jazz
Artist (was Wadada Leo Smith), Big Band (Steven Bernstein Millennial
Territory Orchestra), Trumpet (Wadada Leo Smith), Alto Sax (Oliver Lake,
Tenor Sax (David Murray), Baritone Sax (Vinny Golia), Electric Keyboard
(Matthew Shipp), Organ (John Medeski), Guitar (Mary Halvorson), Electric
Bass (Stomu Takeishi), Drums (Han Bennink), Vibes (Warren Smith),
Percussion (Kahil El'Zabar), Miscellaneous Instrument (Howard Johnson),
Composer (Ben Allison), Blues Artist (Eric Bibb), Beyond Artist (Neil
Young). Those all look like pretty good answers, but so are this year's
picks.

Music Week

Music Week is a day late this week. No holiday schedule or suchlike,
just a lot of tsuris, which among other things pushed Weekend Roundup
from its usual Sunday to Monday. My blog has been under the weather for
a couple weeks now. I've complained to the ISP (addr.com) and gotten no
help whatsoever (at least none they've explained to me). I did tweak
the software (serendipity, or s9y as they prefer) a bit to avoid a table
that seems to be damaged and really doesn't do much good. My plan now
is to try to rebuild the blog on my own server, and if it proves mobile
I may very well move it to another server. The dedicated server I lease
remains a problem. I set up four stub accounts there last week, including
my first attempt to use WordPress for a website but have a lot to learn
there, and I'm still not happy with that ISP. Other computer problems
include several flurries of mailing list bounces, some caused by an
listing at Spamhaus that erroneously spanned my IP addresses, others
by overzealous DMARC processing -- and of course nothing frays my brain
cells more than email debugging.

More pedestrian things that have broken during the last week include a
faucet/lavatory drain, a toilet, a shade, an oven, and various car problems
including an overnight at the garage and two trips to the tire shop. I'm
pleased to report that at least I've managed to fix the plumbing issues.
I've also been much more agitated than usual about politics -- obviously
the situation in Gaza is especially dire, and I agree with Daniel Levy
that the US (meaning Obama) could have stopped it at any point (including
before anyone noticed), but I am every bit as chagrined with Obama for
his mishandling of Iraq and Ukraine, so this point is the lowest regard
I've ever held him in.

On the other hand, today is primary day in Kansas, with virtually all
the action on the Republican side (not my registration, and only true
believers are allowed to vote there). There is a well-funded "tea party"
challenge to Sen. Pat Roberts (polls put Roberts ahead by 30 points but
I expect it will be much closer), and two incumbent Congressmen face
strong challenges: ultra-right Tim Huelskamp burned a lot of bridges
in the rural 1st district getting kicked off the Agriculture Committee
and voting against the big farm bill. In the 4th district Mike Pompeo
(R-Koch) is being challenged by eight-term former congressman Todd
Tiahrt (R-Boeing). When in Congress Tiahrt was a DeLay crony with an
extreme right social record and a taste for big money, but he's been
trying to run to Pompeo's left, attacking him for sponsoring Monsanto's
anti-GMO-labelling law and backing NSA spying. A lot of money in that
race. Sam Brownback is so unpopular Jennifer Winn will get some votes
for governor. Four years ago the right was carrying out a purge of the
last of the moderate Republicans, but one of the few who survived is
running against neanderthal Richard Ranzau for the Sedgwick County
Commission, and another moderate is trying to save us from Secretary
of State Kris Kobach. The net result is that we've been flooded in
anti-Obama propaganda, none of which has managed to sympathize with
the guy. Rather, this feels like the further advance of Dark Ages as
politicians who have done nothing but harm promise to create jobs and
make government work for us.

Meanwhile, of course, there is music. Much of this appeared in last
week's
Rhapsody Streamnotes.
Since then I've slowed down a bit -- it's just been hard to concentrate.
Lot of mail came in last week, and I jumped right into the Clean Feed
package. Neither A- was clear the first time through, but I wound up
playing them quite a bit.

Weekend Roundup

Running a day behind and coming up short as I try to sum up what's
been happening around the world and how Israel/Gaza fits into it. The
blog, by the way, has experienced intermittent failures, something the
ISP (addr.com) has thus far been completely unhelpful at fixing. Sorry
for the inconvenience. Music Week will also run a day late (assuming no
further outages).

This week's links will once again focus mostly on Israel's continuing
assault on Gaza. It is not the only significant war in the world at the
moment -- the governments in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine are simultaneously
engaged in brutal campaigns to bring their own people back under central
state control -- but it is the one that most immediately concerns us in
the US, partly because American partisanship in largely responsible for
the conflict (i.e., the failure to resolve the conflict peacefully);
partly because Israel's thinking and practice in power projection and
counterterrorism is seen as an ideal model by many influential American
foreign policy mandarins (the so-called "neocons," of course, but many
of their precepts have infiltrated the brains of supposedly more liberal
actors, notably the Clintons, Kerry, and Obama); and partly because
Israel has managed to recapitulate the violence and racism of our own
dimly remembered past, something they play on to elicit sympathy even
though a more apt reaction would be horror.

I don't want to belittle the three other "civil wars": indeed, the
US (almost entirely due to Obama) has actively sided with the governments
of Iraq (the US has sent a small number of ground troops and large amounts
of arms there) and Ukraine (the US has led the effort to sanction and
vilify Russia). On the other hand, the US condemned and threatened to
bomb Syria, and has sent (or at least promised) arms to "rebels" there,
although they've also (at least threatened) to bomb the "rebels" too.
But we also know relatively little about those conflicts, and probably
understand less, not least because most of what has been reported has
been selected for propaganda effect. For instance, when "separatists"
in Ukraine tragically shot down a Malaysian airliner, that story led
the nightly news for more than a week, but hardly anyone pointed out
that Ukraine had been shelling and bombing separatist enclaves, and
that anti-aircraft rockets had successfully shot down at least one
Ukrainian military plane before the airliner. (The effective blackout
of news of the conflict, including the use of anti-aircraft missiles
in the region, should bear at least some measure of blame for the
airliner tragedy.) Similarly, we hear much about extreme doctrines
of the breakaway "Islamic State" in Iraq, but virtually nothing of
the Maliki government practices that have managed to alienate nearly
all of northwestern Iraq (as well as the Kurdish regions, which have
all but declared their own breakaway state, one that the US is far
more tolerant of -- perhaps since it doesn't serve to flame
Islamophobic public opinion in the US).

Syria is a much messier problem, for the US anyhow. The state was
taken over by the Ba'ath Party in 1963, and led by the Assad family
since 1971. Syria fought against Israel in the 1948-49 war, and again
in 1967, when Israel seized the Golan Heights, and again in 1973. At
various times Syria made efforts to ally itself with the US (notably
in the 1990 coalition against Iraq), but several factors prejudiced
US opinion against the Assads: the border dispute with Israel and
intermittent Syrian support for the PLO, Syria's resort to Russia
(and later Iran) as its armaments supplier, the repressive police
state and the brutality with which the Assads put down rebellions
(e.g., they killed at least 10,000 people in the Hama massacre of
1982 -- a tactic much admired by Israeli military theoreticians like
Martin Van Creveld). One might think that Syria's lack of democracy
would be an issue, but the US has never objected to other tyrants
that could be counted as more reliable allies, such as the kings
of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But when Assad fired on Arab Spring
demonstrations, prejudice turned Obama against Assad, as the revolt
became militarized he chipped in guns, as it became Islamicized he
waffled. Obama set a "red line" at the use of chemical weapons, and
when that appeared to have been violated, he felt it was his place
to punish Syria with a round of gratuitous bombings, but Congress
demurred, and Putin interceded with an offer by Syria to give up
their chemical weapon stocks. Since then, Obama has promised more
arms to Syrian "rebels" and also threatened to bomb those rebels
connected with the revolt in Iraq, and he ruined his relationship
with Putin -- the only real chance to mediate the conflict -- for
recriminations over Ukraine. Meanwhile, Israel (always seen as a
US ally even though usually acting independently) bombed Syria.

At this point there will be no easy resolution to Syria. One
obvious problem is how many foreign countries have contributed to
one side or the other (or in the case of the US to both, if not
quite all). So the first step would be an international agreement
to use whatever pressure they have to get to a ceasefire and some
sort of power-sharing agreement, but obvious as that direction is,
the other ongoing conflicts make it impossible. Just to take the
most obvious example, the US (Obama) is by far more committed to
marginalizing Russia in Ukraine than it is to peace anywhere in
the Middle East, least of all Israel. Russia is likewise more
focused on Ukraine than anywhere else, although it doesn't help
that its main interest in Syria and Iraq appears to be selling
arms (it supports both governments, making it a US ally in Iraq
as well as an enemy in Syria, blowing the Manichaean minds in
Washington). Saudi Arabia and Iran are far more invested against
or for Syria and Iraq. One could go on and on, but absent any
sort of enlightened world leader willing to step outside of the
narrow confines of self-interest and link the solution to all
of these conflicts, their asymmetries will continue to grind on,
and leave bitter legacies in their paths. In Syria alone, over
more than three years the estimated death toll is over 250,000.
In Iraq estimated deaths since the US exit in 2011 are over
21,000, but much more if you go back to 2003 when the US invaded
and stirred up much sectarian strife. (I couldn't say "started"
there because US culpability goes back to 1991, when Bush urged
Iraqi shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then allowed
the Iraqi army to crush them mercilessly, then instigated "no
fly" zones with periodic bombings, along with sanctions lasting
until the 2003 invasion.)

As for Israel's latest assault on Gaza, in three weeks Israel has
killed over 1,800 Palestinians -- I won't bother trying to separate
out "civilians" and "militants" since Gaza has no organized military
(like the IDF). That may seem like a small number compared to Syria
above, but if you adjust for the relative populations (22.5 million
in Syria, 1.8 million in Gaza) and length of war (171 weeks for Syria,
3 for Gaza) the kill rate is about five times greater in Gaza (333
per million per week vs. 65 per million per week in Syria). Moreover,
the distribution of deaths is extremely skewed in Gaza, whereas in
Syria and Iraq (I have no idea about Ukraine) they are close to even
(to the extent that "sides" make sense there). The distinction between
IDF and "civilians" makes more sense in Israel, especially as nearly
all IDF casualties occurred on Gazan soil after Israel invaded. The
ratio there is greater than 600-to-one (1800+ to 3), a number we'll
have to come back to later. (The first Israeli killed was a settler
who was voluntarily delivering goodies to the troops -- i.e., someone
who would certainly qualify as a "militant"; another was a Thai
migrant-worker, and some tallies of Israeli losses don't even count
him.) The number of Israeli soldiers killed currently stands at 64,
some of which were killed by Israeli ("friendly") fire. (The first
IDF soldier killed was so attributed, but I haven't seen any later
breakdowns. There have been at least two instances where an Israeli
soldier was possibly captured and subsequently killed by Israeli fire --
IDF forces operate under what's called the Hannibal Directive, meant
to prevent situations where Israeli soldiers are captured and used as
bargaining chips for prisoner exchanges, as was Gilad Shalit.) Even
if you counted those IDF deaths, the overkill ratio would be huge.
But without them, it should be abundantly clear how little Israel was
threatened by Hamas and other groups in Gaza. In 2013, no one in Israel
was hurt by a rocket attack from Gaza. This year, in response to Israel
and Egypt tightening Gaza borders, to Israel arresting 500+ people
more or less associated with Hamas (many released in the Shalit deal)
in the West Bank, and to Israel's intense bombardment now lasting three
weeks, more than a thousand rockets were launched from Gaza at Israel,
and the result of all this escalation was . . . 3 dead,
a couple dozen (currently 23) wounded. Just think about it: Israel
gave Gazans all this reason to be as vindictive as possible, and all
it cost them was 3 civilian casualties (one of which they don't even
count). In turn, they inflicted incalculable damage upon 1.8 million
people. The trade off boggles the mind. Above all else, it makes you
wonder what kind of people would do such a thing.

A little history here: Zionist Jews began emigrating from Russia
to the future Israel, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in the 1880s,
following a breakout of pogroms (state-organized or -condoned attacks
on Jews) following the assassination of Czar Alexander. Britain went
to war against the Ottoman Empire in 1914, and made various promises
to both Arabs and Jews of land they would seize from the Ottomans,
including Palestine. In 1920 the British kept Palestine as a mandate.
They took a census which showed the Jewish population at 10%. The
British allowed Jewish immigration in fits and spurts, with the
Jewish population ultimately rising to 30% in 1947. Britain's reign
over Palestine was marked by sporadic violence, notably the Arab
Revolt of 1937-39 which Britain brutally suppressed, using many
techniques which Israel would ultimately adopt, notably collective
punishment. Meanwhile, the British allowed the Zionist community
to form a state-within-the-state, including its own militia, which
aided the British in putting down the Arab Revolt. In 1947, Britain
decided to wash its hands of Palestine and returned the mandate to
the then-new United Nations. The leaders of the Jewish proto-state
in Palestine lobbied the United Nations to partition Palestine into
two parts -- one Jewish, the other Arab (Christian and Moslem) --
and the UN complied with a scheme that offered Jewish control of a
slight majority of the land, Arab control of several remaining
isolated pockets (West Bank, West Galilee, Gaza Strip, Jaffa),
with Jerusalem a separate international zone. There were virtually
no Jews living in the designated Arab areas, but Arabs were more
than 40% of the population of the Jewish areas. The Arabs rejected
the partition proposal, favoring a single unified state with a
two-to-one Arab majority. The Zionist leadership accepted the
partition they had lobbied for, but didn't content themselves
with the UN-specified borders or with the international zone for
Jerusalem. When the British abdicated, Israel declared independence
and launched a war to expand its territory, swallowing West Galilee
and Jaffa, capturing the west half of Jerusalem, and reducing the
size of the Gaza Strip by half. Several neighboring Arab countries
joined this war, notably Transjordan, which was able to secure east
Jerusalem (including the Old City) and the West Bank (including the
highly contested Latrun Salient), and Egypt, which wound up in
control of the reduced Gaza Strip. During this war more than 700,000
Palestinian Arabs were uprooted and fled beyond Israeli control, to
refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, leaving
the land occupied by Israel as 85% Jewish.

Israel signed armistice agreements in 1949-50 with its neighbors.
Jordan annexed its occupied Palestinian territories and gave their
inhabitants Jordanian citizenship, not that that meant much in an
monarchy with no democratic institutions. Egypt didn't annex Gaza;
it styled itself as a caretaker for a fragment of a future independent
Palestinian state, which left its inhabitants in limbo. Israel passed
a series of laws which gave every Jew in the world the right to
immigrate to Israel and enjoy citizenship there, and denied the
right of every Palestinian who had fled the 1948-50 war to ever
return, confiscating the lands of the refugees. Palestinians who
stayed within Israel were granted nominal citizenship, but placed
under military law. Gazan refugees who tried to return to Israel
were shot, and Israel repeatedly punished border incidents by
demolishing homes in Gaza and the West Bank. (Ariel Sharon first
made his reputation by making sure that the homes he blew up in
Qibya in 1953 were still occupied.) Israel was never happy with
its 1950 armistice borders. After numerous border incidents, Israel
launched a sneak attack on Egypt in 1967, seizing Gaza and the
Sinai Peninsula up to the Suez Canal, then quickly expanded the
war into Jordan (grabbing East Jerusalem and the West Bank) and
Syria (the Golan Heights).

The UN resolution following the 1967 war called for Israel to
return all the lands seized during the war in exchange for peace
with all of Israel's neighbors. The Arabs nations were slow to
respond to this "land-for-peace" proposal, although this was the
basis of the 1979 agreement that returned the Sinai Peninsula to
Egypt, and would be the basis of subsequent peace proposals backed
by every nation in the Arab League -- the sole difference is that
Jordan has since renounced its claim to the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, so those as well as Gaza might form the basis of an
independent Palestinian state, as originally envisioned by the
UN. The PLO has agreed to this solution, and Hamas has announced
tacit approval (they have what you may call a funny way of putting
things, one that unfortunately allowed for a large measure of
distortion by Israeli "explainers" [hasbara-ists]). So if Israel
ever wanted peace, both with its neighbors and with its current
and former Palestinian subjects, that simple deal is on the table
(as well as several subsequent ones which allow Israel additional
concessions, although those are less universally accepted).

The rub is that Israel has never wanted peace, and nowadays the
political consensus in Israel is further than ever from willing to
even consider the notion. This is a hard point for most people to
grasp -- who doesn't want peace? -- but nothing Israel does makes
any sense until you realize this. We can trace this back over history,
or you can just look at the current fracas. Israel, after all, could
have decided to handle the June 12 kidnapping-murder as a normal
police matter. Despite everything they've done since, they haven't
caught their two prime suspects, so they couldn't have done less
as to solving the crime, and they would have gotten a lot more
credit and sympathy. But rather than react as any normal country
would, they went out and arrested 500 people who had nothing to
do with the crime, and in the process of doing that they killed
another nine Palestinians. The rockets, which in any case did no
real damage, were primarily a response to the arrests, and more
basically to Israel's blockade of Gaza, which is itself a deeper
manifestation of Israel's belligerency. Even then, Israel could
have ignored the rockets. The decision to start shelling/bombing
Gaza was completely their own, as was the decision to send troops
into Gaza to destroy tunnels that hadn't caused any actual harm
to Israel. In short, all that destruction is the direct result of
Israel reacting the way Israel always reacts to provocations: by
escalating the level of violence. And that's simply not the way a
nation that wants to live in peace behaves.

I can think of several reasons why Israel has chosen to be a state
of perpetual war:

The essential precept of Zionism is that anti-semitism is endemic
in the world, leaving Jews with no recourse except to separate themselves
from everyone else, to retreat to a common defensible redoubt, and to
build iron walls around themselves that their enemies cannot breach.
Because anti-semitism is eternal, peace is illusory, a temptation to
lapse the martial spirit necessary to maintain those walls. The
Holocaust only served to reinforce this early view, and has been
driven deep into the psyches of subsequent generations. The "iron
wall" doctrine was developed by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Proof of how
little Zionism has evolved is that Benjamin Netanyahu is the son of
Jabotinsky's secretary and main disciple.

The core fact of Zionism is that it created a colonial enclave in
a region that was already occupied with the intent of dominating and
expanding that region. In order to survive, the colonists had to
alienate themselves from their surroundings, to cohere and act as a
community, to defend themselves and vanquish the aboriginals. Every
successful example (as well as near misses like French Algeria and
Afrikaner South Africa) developed the same pathologies of racism and
violence, and these are especially sharp in Israel now because the
success of the project seems so tenuous.

Israel's early history, especially the wars of 1948 and 1967, are
exceptionally susceptible to self-mythologizing, both due to the level
of leadership and the semi-miraculous outcomes of those wars: in 1948
Israel declared independence, expanded its UN-specified borders by
nearly 50%, and radically consolidated a large Jewish majority despite
the combined efforts of the Arab armies; in just six days 1967 Israel
won an even more stunning victory over rising Arab nationalists, again
greatly expanding their territory. Such wars are seductive, casting a
mythic glow over the nation's self-conception that none of the later
wars, muffled and muddled as they've been, have managed to erode. Of
course, it helps that one can make a case that the 1948 and 1967 wars
were necessary -- at least to convince neighboring countries that
Israel was a fact they wouldn't be able to forcibly undo.

War is one of the few human endeavors that gives a nation a joint
sense of purpose and belonging, at least as long as it is successful
(or not too dreadfully disastrous). Israelis tasted that in 1948 and
1967 and ever since they fear losing that sense of unity, of common
purpose, identity, fear, and hope. Indeed, every war -- even one that
looks so pointless and horrifying as this one does to the rest of the
world -- creates a huge spike of support for whoever leads it. You
see this elsewhere -- Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War and George H.W.
Bush's original Gulf War are textbook examples, although for the US
World War II was the one that really hit the spot, putting us so far
on top of the world that in many ways, despite many disasters, we
still haven't crashed to earth yet -- but perhaps the sense is even
stronger in a nation with such broad and deep military service, where
the preferred career path in politics or business is promotion in the
IDF (or Israel's numerous other security agencies).

Those four points are all true, self-reinforcing in various combinations
at various times. They help explain why David Ben-Gurion, for instance,
sabotaged his successor for fear that Moshe Sharrett might normalize
relations with Israel's Arab neighbors, turning Israel into an ordinary
country. They help explain why Abba Eban was so disingenuous following
1967, giving lip service to "land-for-peace" while never allowing any
negotiations to take place. They help explain why a long series of
Israeli politicians -- Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon are the two that
stand out in my mind -- tied up so much land by encouraging illegal
settlements, and why today's West Bank settlers retrace the steps
both of the Yishuv's original settlers and of even earlier Americans
encroaching on Indian lands. They help explain why Israelis habitually
label anyone who crosses them a terrorist (something John Kerry was
accused of last week), and why Israel habitually refuses to negotiate
with those it sees as enemies. They help explain why Israel places so
little value on the life of others. (One irony is that a nation which
has no capital punishment for its own citizens, even when one kills a
Prime Minister, yet has casually engaged in hundreds of extrajudicial
assassinations.)

I've gone on at some length here about Israel's innate tendencies
because there seems to be little else directing Netanyahu's process.
It used to be the case that the Zionist movement depended on forming
at least temporary alliances with foreign powers to advance their
goals. For instance, they got the UK to issue the Balfour Declaration
and commit to creating a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine. Later, when
the UK quit, the nascent Israel depended first on the Soviet Union
then on France for arms. Eventually, they found their preferred ally
in the US, but for a long time US presidents could limit Israel's
worst instincts, as when Eisenhower in 1956-57 pressured Israel into
withdrawing from Egypt's Sinai, or when Carter in 1978 reversed an
Israeli effort to enter Lebanon's Civil War. (Neither of those limits
proved long-lasting: Israel retook Sinai when a more accommodating
LBJ was president, and moved recklessly into Lebanon in 1982 under
Reagan's indifference.) As late as 1992, voters were sensitive
enough to Israel's US relationship to replace obdurate Yitzhak
Shamir with the much friendlier Yitzhak Rabin (a former Israeli
ambassador to the US and initiator of the Oslo Peace Process --
ultimately a sham, but one that broke the ice with the US, and
got him killed by a right-wing fanatic). But since then Bush II
turned out to be putty in Ariel Sharon's grubby hands, and Obama
has proven to be even more spineless viz. Netanyahu. So whatever
limits America might have posed to Israeli excesses have gone by
the wayside: Israeli cabinet ministers can accuse Kerry of terrorism
just for proposing a ceasefire, confident that such rudeness won't
even tempt Congress to hold back on an extra $225M in military aid.

Still, you have to ask, "why Gaza?" Two times -- in 1993 when
Israel ceded virtually all of Gaza to the newly formed Palestinian
Authority, and in 2005 when Israel dismantled its last settlements
in Gaza -- Israel signaled to the world that it had no substantive
desire to administer or keep Gaza itself. (It is still possible
that Israel could annex all of the West Bank and Jerusalem and
extend citizenship to Palestinian inhabitants there -- there are
Israelis who advocate such a "one-state solution" there as an
alternative to trying to separate out a Palestinian state given
the scattering of Israeli settlements in the territory, but there
is no way that Israel would entertain the possibility of giving
citizenship to Palestinians in Gaza.) However, Israel has continued
to insist on controlling Gaza's borders and airspace, and limited
its offshore reach to a measly three kilometers. Then in 2006
Palestinians voted for the wrong party -- a slate affiliated with
Hamas, which was still listed by the US and Israel as a "terrorist
entity" (as was the PLO before it was rehabilitated by signing the
Oslo Accords). The US then attempted to organize a coup against
Hamas, which backfired in Gaza, leaving the Strip under Hamas
control. From that point, Israel, with US and Egyptian backing,
shut down the border traffic between Gaza and the outside world --
a blockade which has severely hampered Gaza ever since.

Hamas has since weaved back and forth, appealing for international
help in breaking the blockade, and failing that getting the world's
attention by launching small rockets into Israel. The rockets themselves
cause Israel little damage, but whenever Israel feels challenged it
responds with overwhelming violence -- in 2006, 2008, 2012, and now
in 2014 that violence has reached the level of war. In between there
have been long periods with virtually no rocket fire, with resumption
usually triggered by one of Israel's "targeted assassinations."
Between 2008-12 the blockade was partially relieved by brisk use of
smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. In 2013 Gaza benefited
from relatively free above-ground trade with Egypt, but that came
to an end with the US-backed military coup that ended Egypt's
brief experiment with democracy (another case of the "wrong"
people, as viewed by the US and Israel, getting elected). With
Egypt as well as Israel tightening the blockade of Gaza, followed
by the mass arrest of Hamas people in the West Bank, rocket fire
resumed, only to be met by the recent widespread slaughter.

Hamas has thus far insisted that any ceasefire include an end to
the blockade. As I've written before, that seems like a completely
reasonable demand. Israel has mistreated Gaza ever since occupying
it in 1967, and that treatment became even worse after 2005, becoming
little short of sadistic. Hamas has even offered to turn its control
of the Gaza administration back over to a "unified" PA, which would
be backed but not controlled by Hamas. (In my view an even better
solution would be to spin Gaza off as an independent West Palestine
state, totally free of Israeli interference.) Israel's assertions
regarding Gaza are inevitably confused: they claim they need to
blockade Gaza for security against missiles that in fact are fired
mostly to protest the blockade (the other cases are a weak response
to Israel's far more powerful arsenal). On the other hand, Israeli
control keeps Gaza from ever developing a normal economy, and
Israel's tactics (like targeted assassinations) keep Gaza in a
state of constant terror.

Throughout history, there have been two basic approaches to
counterterrorism: one is to kill off all the terrorists one-by-one;
the other is to negotiate with the terrorists and let them enter
into responsible democratic political procedures. The former has
worked on rare occasions, usually when the group was extremely
small and short-lived (Che Guevara in Bolivia, Shining Path in
Peru). The outer limit was probably the Algerian anti-Islamist
war of 1991-94 where Algeria killed its way through more than
ten generations of leaders before the movement self-destructed,
but even there the conflict ended with negotiations and amnesty.
Israel's practice of collective punishment pretty much guarantees
an endless supply of future enemies. As long as you understand
that Israel's intent and desire is to fight forever, such tactics
make sense. And as long as Israel can maintain that 600-to-1 kill
ratio, someone like Netanyahu's not going to lose any sleep.

Inside Israel military censorship keeps the gory details out of
sight and out of mind, reinforcing the unity that makes this such
a happy little war, but elsewhere it's all becoming increasingly
clear: how flimsy Israel's excuses are, how much they destroy and
how indifferent they are to the pain they inflict, indeed how callous
and tone-deaf they have become. Moreover, this war shows what chumps
the US (and Europe) have become in allying themselves with Israel.
No matter how this war ends, more people than ever before are going
to be shocked that we ever allowed it to happen. Even more so if
they come to realize that there was never any good reason behind it.

Back in June, when all this crisis amounted to was three kidnapped
Israeli settler teens and Israel's misdirected and hamfisted "Operation
Brother's Keeper," I argued that someone with a good journalistic nose
could write a whole book on the affair, one that would reveal everything
distorted and rotten in Israel's occupation mindset, possibly delving
even into the warped logic behind those kidnappings. Since then, I've
been surprised by three things: the scale of human tragedy has become
innumerable (at least in a mere book -- only dry statistics come close
to measuring the destruction, and they still miss the terror, even for
the few people who intuit what they measure); how virulent and unchecked
the genocidal impulses of so many Israelis have become (the trend, of
course, has been in that direction, and every recent war has seen some
outbursts, but nothing like now); and how utterly incompetent and impotent
the US and the international community has been (aside from Condoleezza
Rice's "birthpangs of a new Middle East" speech during the 2006 Lebanon
War, the US and UN have always urged a ceasefire, but this time they've
been so in thrall to Netanyahu's talking points they've scarcely bothered
to think much less developed any backbone to act). It's a tall order,
but this may be Israel's most senseless and shameful war ever.

Israel is in the grip of a kind of collective schizophrenia.
Not only its governors but the majority of its Jewish population have
delusions of both grandeur and persecution, making for a distortion of
reality as a chosen people and part of a superior Western civilization.
They consider themselves more cerebral, reasonable, moral, and dynamic
than Arabs and Muslims generally, and Palestinians in particular. At
the same time they feel themselves to be the ultimate incarnation of
the Jewish people's unique suffering through the ages, still subject
to constant insecurity and defenselessness in the face of ever-threatening
extreme and unmerited punishment.

Such a psyche leads to hubris and vengefulness, the latter a response
to the perpetual Jewish torment said to have culminated, as if by a
directive purpose, in the Holocaust. Remembering the Shoah is Israel's
Eleventh Commandment and central to the nation's civil religion and
Weltanschauung. Family, school, synagogue, and official culture propagate
its prescriptive narrative, decontextualized and surfeited with
ethnocentrism. The re-memorizing of victimization is ritualized on
Yom Ha Shoah and institutionalized by Yad Vashem.

Israel uses the Holocaust to conjure the specter of a timeless
existential peril, in turn used to justify its warfare state and
unbending diplomacy. [ . . . ]

Although its leaders avoid saying so in public, Israel does not
want peace, or a permanent comprehensive settlement, except on its
own terms. They do not dare spell these out publicly, as they presume
the enemy's unconditional surrender, even enduring submission. Instead
the Palestinians continue to be blamed for a chronic state of war that
entails Israel's continuing self-endangerment and militarization.
[ . . . ]

Since Israel's foundation, the failure to pursue Arab-Jewish
understanding and cooperation has been Zionism's "great sin of
omission" (Judah Magnes). At every major turn since 1947-48 Israel
has had the upper hand in the conflict with the Palestinians, its
ascendancy at once military, diplomatic, and economic. This prepotency
became especially pronounced after the Six Day War of 1967. Consider
the annexations and settlements; occupation and martial law; settler
pogroms and expropriations; border crossings and checkpoints; walls
and segregated roads. No less mortifying for the Palestinians has
been the disproportionately large number of civilians killed and
injured, and the roughly 10,000 languishing in Israeli prisons.

Mayer, by the way, is one of the most distinguished historians of
our times, known especially for his landmark book on Versailles and
the post-WWI settlement. More recent books include Why Did the
Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution in History and Plowshares
into Swords: From Zionism to Israel.

Nathan Thrall: Hamas's Chances: In this conflict, Hamas has been made
to look bad by rejecting the one-sided ceasefire proposals of Israel,
Egypt, and the US (although Israel was the first to gun down the latter,
branding John Kerry as a terrorist). Perhaps Hamas simply remembers
Israel's duplicity the last time they negotiated a ceasefire (details
of that ceasefire have rarely been discussed):

The 21 November 2012 ceasefire that ended an eight-day-long exchange of
Gazan rocket fire and Israeli aerial bombardment was never implemented.
It stipulated that all Palestinian factions in Gaza would stop hostilities
against Israel, that Israel would end attacks against Gaza by land, sea
and air -- including the 'targeting of individuals' (assassinations,
typically by drone-fired missile) -- and that the closure of Gaza would
essentially end as a result of Israel's 'opening the crossings and
facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining
from restricting residents' free movements and targeting residents in
border areas.' An additional clause noted that 'other matters as may be
requested shall be addressed,' a reference to private commitments by
Egypt and the US to help thwart weapons smuggling into Gaza, though
Hamas has denied this interpretation of the clause.

During the three months that followed the ceasefire, Shin Bet recorded
only a single attack: two mortar shells fired from Gaza in December 2012.
Israeli officials were impressed. But they convinced themselves that the
quiet on Gaza's border was primarily the result of Israeli deterrence and
Palestinian self-interest. Israel therefore saw little incentive in
upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire,
its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers
and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at
boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza's waters.

The end of the closure never came. Crossings were repeatedly shut.
So-called buffer zones -- agricultural lands that Gazan farmers couldn't
enter without being fired on -- were reinstated. Imports declined, exports
were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the
West Bank.

Israel had committed to holding indirect negotiations with Hamas over
the implementation of the ceasefire but repeatedly delayed them, at first
because it wanted to see whether Hamas would stick to its side of the
deal, then because Netanyahu couldn't afford to make further concessions
to Hamas in the weeks leading up to the January 2013 elections, and then
because a new Israeli coalition was being formed and needed time to settle
in. The talks never took place. The lesson for Hamas was clear. Even if an
agreement was brokered by the US and Egypt, Israel could still fail to
honour it.

Yet Hamas largely continued to maintain the ceasefire to Israel's
satisfaction. It set up a new police force tasked with arresting
Palestinians who tried to launch rockets. In 2013, fewer were fired
from Gaza than in any year since 2003, soon after the first primitive
projectiles were shot across the border. Hamas needed time to rebuild
its arsenal, fortify its defences and prepare for the next battle,
when it would again seek an end to Gaza's closure by force of arms.
But it also hoped that Egypt would open itself to Gaza, thereby
ending the years during which Egypt and Israel had tried to dump
responsibility for the territory and its impoverished inhabitants
on each other and making less important an easing of the closure
by Israel.

In July 2013 the coup in Cairo led by General Sisi dashed Hamas's
hopes. His military regime blamed the ousted President Morsi of the
Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, its Palestinian offshoot, for all of
Egypt's woes. Both organisations were banned. Morsi was formally
charged with conspiring with Hamas to destabilise the country. The
leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and hundreds of Morsi's supporters
were sentenced to death. The Egyptian military used increasingly
threatening rhetoric against Hamas, which feared that Egypt, Israel
and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority would take advantage of its
weakness to launch a co-ordinated military campaign. Travel bans were
imposed on Hamas officials. The number of Gazans allowed to cross to
Egypt was reduced to a small fraction of what it had been before the
coup. Nearly all of the hundreds of tunnels that had brought goods
from Egypt to Gaza were closed. Hamas had used taxes levied on those
goods to pay the salaries of more than 40,000 civil servants in Gaza.

Thrall also has more details on the "unification" agreement with
Fatah, which is widely seen as the main reason Netanyahu singled out
Hamas -- not that he really cares which Palestinian faction he refuses
to do business with:

The final option, which Hamas eventually chose, was to hand over
responsibility for governing Gaza to appointees of the Fatah-dominated
Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, despite having defeated it in the
2006 elections.

Hamas paid a high price, acceding to nearly all of Fatah's demands.
The new PA government didn't contain a single Hamas member or ally,
and its senior figures remained unchanged. Hamas agreed to allow the
PA to move several thousand members of its security forces back to
Gaza, and to place its guards at borders and crossings, with no
reciprocal positions for Hamas in the West Bank security apparatus.
Most important, the government said it would comply with the three
conditions for Western aid long demanded by the US and its European
allies: non-violence, adherence to past agreements and recognition
of Israel. Though the agreement stipulated that the PA government
refrain from politics, Abbas said it would pursue his political
programme. Hamas barely protested.

The agreement was signed on 23 April, after Kerry's peace talks
had broken down; had the talks been making progress, the US would
have done its best to block the move. But the Obama administration
was disappointed in the positions Israel took during the talks,
and publicly blamed it for its part in their failure. Frustration
helped push the US to recognise the new Palestinian government
despite Israel's objections. But that was as far as the US was
prepared to go. Behind the scenes, it was pressuring Abbas to
avoid a true reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.
[ . . . ]

The fears of Hamas activists were confirmed after the government
was formed. The terms of the agreement were not only unfavourable but
unimplemented. The most basic conditions of the deal -- payment of the
government employees who run Gaza and an opening of the crossing with
Egypt -- were not fulfilled. For years Gazans had been told that the
cause of their immiseration was Hamas rule. Now it was over, their
conditions only got worse.

The June 12 kidnappings took place ten days after the new PA
government was formed. That soon led to the current war, which in
some ways has given Hamas another lease on life (peculiar as that
seems):

For Hamas, the choice wasn't so much between peace and war as between
slow strangulation and a war that had a chance, however slim, of loosening
the squeeze. It sees itself in a battle for its survival. Its future in
Gaza hangs on the outcome. Like Israel, it's been careful to set rather
limited aims, goals to which much of the international community is
sympathetic. The primary objective is that Israel honour three past
agreements: the Shalit prisoner exchange, including the release of the
re-arrested prisoners; the November 2012 ceasefire, which calls for an
end to Gaza's closure; and the April 2014 reconciliation agreement,
which would allow the Palestinian government to pay salaries in Gaza,
staff its borders, receive much needed construction materials and open
the pedestrian crossing with Egypt.

These are not unrealistic goals, and there are growing signs that
Hamas stands a good chance of achieving some of them. Obama and Kerry
have said they believe a ceasefire should be based on the November
2012 agreement. The US also changed its position on the payment of
salaries, proposing in a draft framework for a ceasefire submitted
to Israel on 25 July that funds be transferred to Gazan employees.
[ . . . ]

The greatest costs, of course, have been borne by Gaza's civilians,
who make up the vast majority of the more than 1600 lives lost by the
time of the ceasefire announced and quickly broken on 1 August. The
war has wiped out entire families, devastated neighbourhoods,
destroyed homes, cut off all electricity and greatly limited access
to water. It will take years for Gaza to recover, if indeed it ever does.
[ . . . ]

The obvious solution is to let the new Palestinian government return
to Gaza and reconstruct it. Israel can claim it is weakening Hamas by
strengthening its enemies. Hamas can claim it won the recognition of
the new government and a significant lifting of the blockade. This
solution would of course have been available to Israel, the US, Egypt
and the PA in the weeks and months before the war began, before so
many lives were shattered.

More Israel links:

Joel Beinin: Racism is the Foundation of Israel's Operation Protective
Edge: Quotes Israeli Knesset member Ayelet Shaked, urging the wholesale
slaughter of women in Gaza: "Now, this also includes the mothers of the
martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They must follow
their sons. Nothing would be more just. They should go, as well as the
physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little
snakes will be raised there." Another Israeli urged that the mothers
and sisters be raped. "Racism has become a legitimate, indeed an
integral, component of Israeli public culture, making assertions
like these seem 'normal.' The public devaluation of Arab life enables
a society that sees itself as 'enlightened' and 'democratic' to
repeatedly send its army to slaughter the largely defenseless
population of the Gaza Strip -- 1.8 million people
[ . . . ] imprisoned since 1994."

Juan Cole: Top 5 Ways the US Is Israel's Accomplice in War Crimes in Gaza:
the US shares raw signals intelligence directly with Israel; the US
continually replenishes Israel's ammunition; the US pressures Egypt to
uphold the blockade of Gaza; "Since 2012, the USA has exported $276
million worth of basic weapons and munitions to Israel"; the US actively
opposed nonmember observer state status to Palestine at the UN (which
would give Palestine recourse to the International Criminal Court, which
would offer a legal pathway for challenging Israeli war crimes).

Evan Jones: A Short History of Israeli Impunity: starts with a
semi-famous 1891 quote from Ahad Ha'am reporting on the first Zionists
in Palestine: "[Our brethren in Eretz Israel] were slaves in their
land of exile and they suddenly find themselves with unlimited
freedom . . . This sudden change has engendered in
them an impulse to despotism as always happens when 'a slave becomes
a king,' and behold they walk with the Arabs in hostility and cruelty,
unjustly encroaching on them'." Of course, it only goes downhill from
there. The rest of the long piece is pure screed, in case that's what
you're in the mood for.

David Kirkpatrick: Arab Leaders, Viewing Hamas as Worse Than Israel,
Stay Silent: "After the military ouster of the Islamist government
in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states --
including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- that
has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the
Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip." Israel supporters
(David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer are two I recall) are quick
to enlist this "coalition" as proof of how out of step Hamas is --
I've even heard Syria added to the list. Each of those has its own
peculiar reasons, but net effect is likely to backfire, as it aligns
the Arab despots with Israel while relegating the entire Palestinian
resistance against Israel to extreme Islamists -- as if they are the
only ones with sufficient integrity to defend human rights.

Philip Kleinfeld: Racists Are Rampaging Through Israel: Many, many
examples. "Israel has never been the kind of free and open society it
has tried so hard to project. Racism did not begin with the murder of
Mohammed Abu Khdeir or the beating and attempted lynching of Jamal
Julani. 'Zionist doctrine has always pushed society in a very particular
direction,' the academic Marcelo Svirsky told me. But it is getting
worse. [ . . . ] One of the most striking aspects
of this 'phenomenon' is how young the people taking part appear to be.
Those posting on social media, running amok in lynch mobs, and crashing
leftist rallies with sticks, chains, and brass knuckles are, for the
most part, young people -- many in their mid-20s, some in their teens."

Stephen Robert: There'll be more Gazas without a two-state solution:
The author still hopes for a "two-state solution," but realizes that
regardless of what Netanyahu may say when it is convenient, he will
never allow that. "The Netanyahu coalition favors a bi-national state,
a state where a large percentage of its inhabitants will not be citizens
and will be governed without their consent. They will continue, as has
been the case for forty-seven years, to be denied the most basic rights
of a civil society."

Richard Silverstein: Israeli TV Poll, What to Give Barack Obama for His
Birthday? 48% Say: Ebola: "Doesn't this tell us quite a bit about the
Israeli political environment? The leader of Israel's only real ally in
the world is despised so much that Israelis would like to see him dead."
As I recall, during Bush's two terms the right-wing hype machine was
ever-so-sensitive about any perceived slight against America's president,
out of respect for the office and the country if nothing else. But that
all went away when Obama was elected -- given the things Republicans
routinely say about Obama, it's no wonder that Israelis think it's all
right to pile on.

Is Iron Dome better at destroying missiles or spreading fear: Quotes
a letter: "One commentator rightly said that Iron Dome functions as the
Deus-ex-Machina of this war. Everyone but us is convinced it saves lives.
We see it more as a psychological warfare device. Curiously, much of the
explosion sound that gets people so worked up here is largely produced
by the Iron Dome system itself. What is striking if not outright suspicious
is that there is hardly any information in the aftermath of interceptions;
we know nothing about it and nobody cares."

Notes on Everyday Life

Back in the early 1970s, I fell in with four other young leftists,
mostly fellow students at Washington University in St. Louis. They
wanted to publish an underground radical rag, and "Notes on Everyday
Life" was their suggested title. This came readily opon the discovery
that the personal was political as well as vice versa, and that both
were connected to the technology and social relations of production
and distribution, something so all pervasive that it permeated all
human culture. We were curious about how all this worked, but under
it all we were unhappy about the inequities that resulted and the
violence that the system depended upon. In 1972, for instance, the
US was still engaged in the longest and most dishonest war in the
history of the republic, while the US president was engaged in the
most cynical and callous acts to date to undermine democracy. We
didn't figure we could do much about this, but by poking at the
frayed edges of what seemed like a system, we felt we could raise
a bit of consciousness, the more questions people would ask about
what's worth doing and what isn't.

Little did we know then that forty-some years later the period
of time we were so unsettled by would come to resemble a lost golden
era, the point in US history when incomes and outcomes were closer
to being equitable than before or since, a period of great reforms
and transformations, a period of relative reason, one where the
courts sided with an expansion of freedom, and after Vietnam one
of relative peace and prosperity. But to be fair to ourselves, it
now appears as though the tide had already turned -- I now make
the "peak oil" year of 1969 to have been pivotal, but the 1970s
saw the emergence of an ever more aggressive financial class and
the always corruptible American political system soon succumbed.

After a couple years, we moved on: one toward a sociology Ph.D.,
one wound up teaching remedial high school, one emerged as a slumlord
in St. Louis. I became an amateur rock critic and a professional
software engineer, only to find post-2001 events push me back into
writing more about politics again. Sensing that
my website had become torn between
those with an interest in music and those preoccupied with politics,
I thought it would be a good idea to sort my interests out into two
relatively specialized websites, and I named each for an early effort
at publishing:
Terminal Zone for music,
Notes on Everyday Life for more political interests -- admittedly,
a division we wouldn't have embraced in the early 1970s, when Notes
had much to say about music. Still, those sites floundered, with earlier
iterations wiped out by a server failure. The first drafts of both were
mostly cloned from my blog. I don't really have a plan at the moment:
just two domain names, a dedicated server, and some software to learn.

Certainly one way I might like this to develop would be if some young
nerdy types were to pick up on the original ideas we were tuned into and
apply them anew. Given how far America has backslid, much of what we
thought all but too obvious forty years ago still needs to be broadly
relearned.

Daily Log

I've been hearing complaints about my blog being inaccessible, and
the last couple times I discarded comments the page failed to load. So
I did some exploring. I was able to open the database through the shell
interface. Note the following table sizes: